The best of all worlds: Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle (Part I) 

The time has finally arrived! The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle which is an integrated, validated, tested and engineered system has been launched. This solution will help the Oracle DBAs and other IT users address and eliminate most of the below expectations and challenges in a typical Oracle database infrastructure.

• Higher performance which should be consistent and scalable with the exponential data deluge.
• Higher availability and reliability for mission critical applications.
• Optimal time and operational process management related to database infrastructure.
• Optimal control of database CAPEX, licensing and resource cost with enhanced productivity.
• Improved interoperability among multiple vendors for support of database and other related activities.

It is indeed incredible that the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle addresses all the above concerns/challenges and provides a better solution vis-à-vis its competitors. When we talk of vetted claims (verified by internal and external sources of Dell EMC) regarding its features, the following points are worth mentioning:-

• 20% lesser Oracle licensing cost.
• 5X Space savings for copies of Oracle databases.
• 99K+ IOPS with sub-millisecond(0.75 milliseconds) latencies
• Six Nine’s availability for Oracle databases.

Now let’s look into the individual components that deliver the above exceptional features/statistics. All the components of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle  come from the best of all worlds like Dell EMC VMAX 250F (storage), Dell EMC PowerEdge 14G servers (compute), VMware vSphere (Virtualization), Oracle 12cRel2 database (database), Dell EMC AppSync (Applications) etc. as depicted in figure 1 :-

Figure 1: Components of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle

This stack of Dell EMC software and hardware along with Oracle Database and Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers umpteen benefits individually or as the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle. The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle facilitates the management, optimization, and reduction of OPEX & CAPEX costs to help with the ever-increasing pressure on organizational budget. This bundle offers high resiliency, availability, productivity, performance and innovation. For all technical and non-technical issues, there is a single support window manned by experienced and reputed Dell EMC personnel. Now let’s try to understand all the components of The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle.

Dell EMC VMAX 250F All Flash Array is the storage component which is designed to consolidate multiple mixed workload Oracle databases into a single platform with a very high IOPS and sub-millisecond response time. Dell EMC Connectrix Switches and directors provide six 9s high availability, built-in high availability, maximum scalability and unmatched reliability with high performance. The Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 is designed to power the Oracle mission-critical applications and real-time decisions, consolidate hardware resources and/or save Oracle licensing costs. Oracle databases are increasingly running(over 70% of the customer base) on the VMware vSphere platform . So far as Oracle Database is concerned, VMware delivers an industry-leading intelligent virtual infrastructure that maximizes performance, scalability and availability while enabling fully automated disaster recovery, better-than-physical security, and proactive management of service levels. Red Hat Linux 7.3 helps in optimizing Oracle Database environments to keep up with the ever increasing workload demands and evolving security risks. Dell EMC AppSync simplifies, orchestrates and automates the process of generating and consuming application consistent copies of production data. It provides intuitive workflows to setup scheduled protection and repurposing jobs that provide end to end automation of all the steps from application discovery and storage mapping to mounting of the copies to the target hosts.

All the benefits that are described above are available in the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle.

Variants of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle

With the above components in place, we have two variants available at present. They are small and medium configurations as depicted in Figures 2 & 3. The “large configuration” variant will be discussed in my next blog..

Figure 2: Small Configuration

Figure 3: Medium Configuration

Both small and medium configurations ensure higher performance, scalability, resilience and availability. With these configurations, Dell EMC has conducted some in-house testing and found some interesting/extraordinary results. Let me discuss these results.

Dell EMC has run five tests for five different use cases as documented below:-

1. Two production Oracle RAC clusters
2. Repurposing five production databases to fifteen dev RAC database clusters.
3. Cluster of five OLAP production databases
4. Mixed OLTP workloads
5. Mixed OLAP and OLTP workloads

The detailed configuration and the outcomes of the various tests are documented here.  In this blog I want to touch upon the last test (use case five) that was run based on the below configuration.

Figure 4: Configuration and Pictorial Diagram of Use Case Five Test

The outcome of this test is phenomenal which is depicted in figure 5.

Figure 5: Outcome of Use Case Five Test

Summary

The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle is an awesome solution with great features like scalability, performance, consolidation, automation, centralized management and protection.  So far as technical virtues of this solution is concerned, it has been internally tested which delivers fantastic results in terms of higher IOPS, bandwidth, scalability, consolidation along with consistent sub-millisecond (less than .75 milliseconds) latencies even after adding enhanced OLTP and OLAP workloads. All these salient features of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle in turn reduce the CAPEX and OPEX costs. More importantly, you feel less worried as the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle makes lifecycle management simpler and all the support and services requests are taken care of by Dell EMC staff with over 10 years of experience.  Additionally, the Dell EMC R740/R940 Servers can sustain multiple and larger workloads with less CPU and memory utilization. When we talk of Dell EMC VMAX 250F storage we observed that it generates 99K+ IOPS (in-house) along with higher throughput and less than .75 millisecond latencies for mixed workloads. Repurposing copies generated by the Dell EMC AppSync software helps in 5X flash storage space savings due to the inline deduplication and compression features of VMAX 250F All flash arrays. AppSync also helps in automation of the cloned production database copies and protection of the databases.  Net-net, the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle is a winning solution in all aspects as it combines the best of all the worlds of a typical datacenter.

N.B : The large configuration of Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle has been discussed in my next blog.

In the Part III of this blog series, I would like to discuss about a new Oracle solution on XtremIO X2 Array.