In today’s economic reality enterprises must capture data from every possible source to identify new opportunities and gain competitive advantage while keeping costs under control. The resulting data explosion is creating new challenges for IT organizations around the world. In many organizations Oracle databases are critical to the business and are growing rapidly, which requires cost-effective storage that can be easily managed and scaled while delivering optimal performance.

Built on a breakthrough virtualized peer storage architecture, Dell EqualLogic lets companies consolidate Oracle database storage resources in an iSCSI storage area network (SAN) that is affordable and easy to manage—and that provides intelligent, automated management tools and a comprehensive set of enterprise data services. With the EqualLogic peer architecture, storage arrays work together to share resources, distribute loads, optimize performance and provide comprehensive data protection. Its online, on-demand scalability, ease of management, and innovative, all-inclusive pricing model represents a new way of approaching storage—one that helps Oracle administrators reduce costs and complexity.

Key Benefits

Growth Without Disruption
Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN can be set up very quickly and administrators can seamlessly add storage on-line as more capacity is needed. The system’s intelligent software automatically configures the storage array—without disrupting Oracle database access to the storage pool—thereby eliminating complex and cumbersome manual set-up tasks found in traditional storage products. What’s more, the necessary ports and controllers are included in each EqualLogic array, helping to ensure linear performance improvements as capacity is increased.

Streamlined Management
With Dell EqualLogic, IT professionals can support Oracle databases with virtualized and tiered pools of storage managed via a single, intuitive user interface. IT administrators can configure separate storage pools within a single SAN to help build an efficient, flexible easy-to-manage storage environment.

EqualLogic encompasses a number of innovative features, such as automatic storage tiering and thin provisioning, that help streamline administration without increased complexity. In terms of keeping data safe, EqualLogic enables administrators to easily create and manage Oracle database snapshots, clones and replicas. This facilitates quick Oracle database backup and recovery, ease of application development and testing, and recovery of Oracle database from site disasters. This range of automated features and administrative efficiencies helps IT organizations control costs.

All-inclusive Pricing Model
EqualLogic’s use of Gigabit Ethernet technology lets you utilize the cabling, switches and network adapters installed in the standard Ethernet network, and leverages the existing IP networking knowledge of your IT staff. And unlike traditional storage arrays, the EqualLogic PS Series storage array comes complete with all of the available software features that are needed to create and run an enterprise-class SAN for Oracle databases. There are no additional software costs involved.

Key Features

• Quickly deploy Oracle database storage by using a standard Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure.
• Easily manage Oracle database storage by using virtualized and tiered pools of storage via an intuitive GUI or CLI.
• Meet growing capacity demand by seamlessly adding storage on-line with no database down time.
• Improve Oracle database performance and availability by automatically balancing load across all available storage resources.
• Linearly scale storage performance and capacity with additional Oracle RAC nodes.
• Easily create consistent local and remote copies of Oracle database for application test and development, backup, and recovery from logical corruption and other disasters.