Utility Storage Integral to Delivering on the Promise of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Program

In an effort to provide the highest level of support and performance to end users, corporate IT has often acquired and deployed software and hardware solutions that, over time, are unable to meet the increasing demands for application performance and scalability. Issues such as vendor lock-in and high administrative overhead continue to increase costs and reduce ROI. For this reason IT departments have realized and embraced the advantages of commodity hardware and open source solutions.

The Linux operating system has long been a staple within IT infrastructures to accomplish these goals as it enables IT departments to utilize low-cost commodity server hardware to power enterprise class software. Taking advantage of low-cost servers to run Linux is one of the differentiating factors when organizations attack the total overall cost reduction puzzle for servers. Robust features, such as the clustering of Linux servers to replace larger, more expensive servers, while providing for higher levels of flexibility, availability, and scalability, only further drives home the significant price/performance benefits that prompts companies to adopt this approach.

While many benefits are realized with the deployment of key features such as clustering and low cost server hardware, there is the potential to increase complexity and administrative costs. Trying to hire a complete and competent workforce to manage Linux servers, or turning to outside consultants to deploy, manage, and maintain this new un-charted IT infrastructure, can be risky and introduce new costs. Simplifying the support model by utilizing outside services is critical to reducing these administrative burdens and costs.

Organizations can now take advantage of enterprise level support from companies such as Oracle that have a high stake in the success of Linux. Under the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support program, Oracle offers true enterprise-class support for Linux with premier services such as free binaries, patches, fixes, updates, backports, and Oracle global support, all with the intent of helping organizations succeed with Linux at a significantly lower cost.

The Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support program offers three levels of Linux support so an organization can easily choose a support level that caters to their individual needs and comfort levels with Linux. As a worldwide enterprise support provider, Oracle has a team of over 7000 support professionals including dedicated Linux engineers to take part in complete testing and optimization initiatives as well as expert installation, configuration and Linux stack deployment so Oracle is well positioned to offer superior support services.

Also, as part of the Unbreakable Linux Support program, Oracle performs comprehensive testing and optimization of Linux with storage vendors. This ensures: compatibility between Linux and storage solutions; the promotion of storage solutions that provide performance and innovation; reductions in system complexity and costs for enterprise solutions; and, out-of-the-box readiness for immediate system deployments.

As part of this initiative to help simplify management and reduce costs, 3PAR recently joined the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program to extend this out-of-the-box readiness to encompass its next-generation storage. 3PAR's Utility Storage lets you provision virtual capacity to applications once and purchase pooled physical capacity only as applications truly require it for written data, so companies can provision or meter storage as they need it. This extends the basic, low cost tenets of Linux to the storage systems that companies use with their Linux clusters by enabling companies to simplify the provisioning of storage during periods of peak demand while eliminating purchasing and deployment delays.

However do not confuse the management simplicity of 3PAR's Utility Storage technology with other storage systems. The 3PAR storage solution in both OLTP and OLAP environments, as the recent SPC-1 benchmark shows, delivers not only supply high performance but also scales as Oracle workloads increase. Adding to the utility of 3PAR storage, the fact that workloads are striped across all array resources deliver robust and load balanced performance, eliminating the administrative nightmares associated with application performance tuning.

The 3PAR and Oracle partnership in the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program provides a new framework for organizations to simplify system and storage management, consolidate support and offer cost savings from the storage infrastructure level up to the application environment. Complete dedication from the community is what now makes Linux a viable solution for many organizations now. 3PAR's added support for the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program is one more way that companies can now lower their total costs of data management while simplifying the delivery of enterprise IT as a utility service.