DBA Role Elevates in the Cloud, New EMC Solutions There To Help

Oracle Open World is an important time of year for Oracle customers to learn about everything Oracle. This year’s buzz is heavily focused on cloud computing. What is often overlooked is not all the cool tech, but how it will impact IT peoples’ day-jobs.

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DBAs are the nucleus around which all processes flow. As Oracle customers move to cloud computing, the DBAs’ role may change, but it won’t diminish. In fact, a recent IOUG survey of over 30,000 DBAs outlined their top weekly tasks including tuning performance, creating and maintaining copies of data, and managing uptime and availability.

EMC invests heavily in providing Oracle DBAs tested solutions that filter out the fluff, document real-world results and provide technical guidance to help DBAs achieve outstanding results. Four new solutions have been published by EMC for Oracle DBAs.

They include:

Mixed Workloads With No Planning or Tuning – Historically, DBAs have frowned upon mixing non-production and production workloads on the same storage system. But with EMC XtremIO all-flash arrays (AFAs), it can now be done while maintaining SLAs and application performance. How is this possible? XtremIO’s unique architecture offers consistent and predictable performance at scale, including in-memory metadata and application copy services. These application copy services catalyze transformational levels of efficiency for DBAs, including:

  • Providing development and QA teams with instant database copies with no space or SLA impact.
  • Accelerating analytics workflows by delivering real-time and on-demand decision support extractions.
  • Consolidating databases and scaling workload performance while — at less than half the cost of the current infrastructure.

Database as a Service Without Production Impact – This new EMC solution shows DBAs how to use EMC AppSync to take control of database copy operations, including creating and restoring patch environments, creating test and development environments and using Oracle Snapshot Optimization to protect and restore production with or without Oracle hot backup mode. Creating copies is nearly instantaneous, so the timeframes shown are the actual times to click through the AppSync wizard to fully complete each process.

Up to 20x Faster Oracle Backup and Complete DBA Control – Traditional backup solutions struggle to meet stringent SLAs for Oracle databases – especially the performance and efficiency required for databases stored on an all-flash array. In addition, many DBAs want full control of the RMAN backup process without involving the backup team. EMC Data Domain can offer the combination of performance, efficiency and control. Today, EMC announced ProtectPoint for XtremIO, which offers 20x faster backup and eliminates backup impact on Oracle servers – by empowering DBAs to backup directly from XtremIO to Data Domain via RMAN. For those organizations not ready for ProtectPoint, the EMC Solution here shows DBAs the steps to take full control of offloaded or online backups using DD Boost for Oracle RMAN. This includes showing how a 20 TB database can be backed up at 36 TB/hr. and also backed up while production runs online.

The Next Evolution For DBAs: Self-Service Hybrid Cloud Computing

EMC solutions empower DBAs to handle their primary day jobs faster and easier, including cloud infrastructure management.

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This new EMC solution outlines step-by-step how DBAs can leverage EMC Hybrid Cloud to take control of database provisioning operations in a virtualized environment, including adding vCPU, memory and storage once provisioned. More EMC Hybrid Cloud Solutions for Oracle databases will be released soon!

All of these solutions and others can be found on the DBA Society, where DBAs can engage other DBAs and EMC’s own database and analytics experts – we encourage all DBAs to join and become an agent of efficiency!

About the Author: Jason Kotsaftis