Born to Run: Pure Storage Platform for Oracle

Similar to Bruce Springsteen’s iconic song, database environments need storage solutions that are born to run—simplifying and accelerating data operations while breaking free from the constraints of traditional storage solutions such as frequent downtime.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, Oracle data teams face numerous challenges with their legacy storage systems, from managing the storage complexity for large-scale Oracle environments to grappling with suboptimal storage performance and expensive downtimes. 

In a recent survey of over 1,500 IT leaders, 98% of the respondents agreed that their organization’s infrastructure needs improvement to support risk and innovation initiatives. Eighty percent of the respondents were also worried that their business will be left behind if their infrastructure can’t support Al fast enough. 

It’s clear that legacy storage is not ready for the new agile as-a-service world. There’s a growing need for simple, sustainable, and transformational storage that is better suited for modern Oracle environments. Analyst reports indicate that IT leaders are increasingly shifting from traditional storage solutions to data infrastructure platforms that offer a wide array of capabilities beyond mere storage, including hybrid cloud support, AI integration, and scalability. 

With Oracle CloudWorld 2024 on the horizon, Pure Storage is looking forward to showcasing our game-changing data storage platform for Oracle database environments. Instead of struggling with storage silos and being stuck in the past, Pure Storage gives organizations a unified simple solution that can serve the whole business. The goal is to reduce risk, remove uncertainty, and help transform Oracle data operations with a straightforward, secure, as-a-service platform. 

Let’s discuss some of these aspects of the Pure Storage platform in more detail. 

Simplicity

In the past, the complexity of legacy storage has meant more maintenance, person-hours, and resource management for Oracle data teams. In contrast, the Pure Storage platform has been designed to be simple from the beginning and with the same ease, agility, and portability as cloud environments. With a single common OS (Purity) across every environment, Oracle teams don’t need to learn multiple systems and utilize storage. Centralizing data on a single platform also helps these teams streamline data operations for massive Oracle databases and benefit from fewer systems to manage. Lastly, they can benefit from a variety of approaches to seamlessly integrate with existing workflows—whether through the Purity GUI, the Pure1® management tool, automated scripting with RESTful APIs, or integration with third-party management platforms. 

Recently, Pure Storage had two exciting announcements that are very relevant for Oracle environments: the first-of-its-kind storage automation and an industry-first generative AI copilot for storage. Pure Fusion™ unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data, on premises and in the cloud. The AI copilot for storage represents a new way to manage and protect data using natural language, by leveraging data insights from tens of thousands of Pure Storage customers. This can help guide Oracle storage teams through every step of investigating complex performance and management issues and staying ahead of security incidents. 

Performance 

Storage performance bottlenecks with legacy storage systems have been a constant headache for Oracle data teams. Slow query performance resulting from these bottlenecks degrades the overall performance of the applications and affects customer experiences. Increased latency in I/O operations can result in slower transaction times for Oracle databases, delays, and time-outs. Pure Storage’s flash management approach with DirectFlash® addresses these challenges. With latency as low as 250μs and up to 36GB/s throughput, the Pure Storage platform enables rapid response times for database queries and enhances customer experiences. 

Another performance area relates to the speed and ease with which copies of Oracle data in production environments can be made available to other areas of the organization for development, testing, or analytics. With Pure Storage, snapshots can be created in less than a millisecond and take up very little space since they’re simple data structures filled with only pointers to actual data. They’re also very portable. 

Lastly, storage performance predictability also matters. In this webinar session, Principal Field Solutions Architect Thomas Stutesman provided great details on how Pure Storage’s quality of service policies deliver consistent performance even under heavy workloads. 

Dealing with Downtime and Data Loss 

It should come as no surprise that storage downtimes and data loss can cause severe operational, financial, and reputational impacts for organizations. From a business continuity perspective, disruptions to business operations and long recovery times lead to lost productivity and revenue and failure to meet RPO/RTO objectives. Lack of data integrity can compromise Oracle database operations while data loss from ransomware and other scenarios can be truly catastrophic. 

The Pure Storage platform can help eliminate downtime and increase Oracle data resilience in a number of ways. Infrastructure teams can enable storage backups with minimal overhead and bandwidth requirements. They can combine Pure Storage snapshots with native database-level features (such as Oracle RMAN) to quickly restore and meet the most stringent recovery point objectives. Similarly, they can replicate storage to other arrays with Pure Storage’s ActiveCluster™ and ActiveDR™. Both features can be combined with native platform and/or database-level availability features to further enhance resiliency. To prevent critical data loss and ensure compliance, they can also apply consistent data protection policies related to data volume groups and protect against ransomware with Pure Storage® SafeMode™ Snapshots which are immutable and secure. 

The seamless consistent data protection and recovery approach by the Pure Storage platform applies to both traditional on-premises environments as well as cloud environments (with cloud block storage and Portworx® for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). Additionally, Pure Storage was among the first vendors to provide a slew of SLA guarantees with our storage-as-a-service offering. 

Uncomplicate Oracle Data Storage

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Cost Reduction

With flat budgets, Oracle infrastructure teams have been tasked with doing more with less. Rising energy costs for their data centers are also a significant concern. Where legacy storage systems hit a ceiling and require replacement, Pure Storage’s Evergreen® architecture enables these teams to continuously evolve their storage platform with no downtime and constant improvements without disruption. With leading data reduction techniques, the Pure Storage platform can provide 80% power reduction with less than 1W/TB power consumption and 95% less rack space required for the Oracle storage footprint. Lastly, customers can always choose to consume storage any way they want, with flexible data storage subscriptions that continuously improve and are tailored to your business needs. 

Interested in learning more? Register for our upcoming pre-event TechTalks webinar on enhancing Oracle success with effective data storage platforms. 

While in Vegas, stop by Booth #50 and talk to our Oracle experts. 

Join Ron Ekins (Pure Storage’s Director of Field Solution Architectures and Oracle ACE Director) at the following sessions:

• THR3738: Elevating Oracle Databases with Modern Data Storage Platforms (September 11, 10:30am PDT)
• LRN3410: Getting Started with Kubernetes Operators for Databases (September 12, 11:30am PDT)