Oracle gears up to capture major slice of ‘storage solutions’ market

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) could start small and as they grow, Oracle’s strategy is to provide support in terms of storage solutions that are “scalable, simple and easy to manage.” AFP PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – A leading firm in storage solutions is gearing up to be “the storage of choice” by providing “best of breed, ready for business and easy to manage” applications to its customers.

Andrew Lim, Vice President for System Sales for the Asia Pacific Division of Oracle Corporation said in a recent press briefing that they “care about (giving top) performance at the lowest cost” without compromising quality.

“IT changes at record speed,” Lim said, explaining that firms needed efficient applications and IT solutions to manage their growing data.

“The nature of data is changing,” he added, stating that firms often face difficulties in archiving data as it steadily increases, in varying data types.

“The re-use of data is shrinking. Eighty percent of data (stored) is never used after 90 days. Storage management (for these data) costs more,” said Lim, pegging the expenditure for data storage to up to 30 percent of the total IT expenses of a company.

“Data storage also consumes a lot of power,” he stated, adding that Oracle’s storage solutions were designed to save energy.

Oracle offers accelerated performance with lower IT costs through their business-ready storage systems, complete business systems that combine business application software with tiered storage for the best performance, efficiency and scale, according to Lim. He said that Oracle aims to double the data storage efficiency rates of its clients, and ensure that power, cooling and space are appropriately utilized.

Lim added that Oracle also sought to secure its clients’ ‘most valuable asset’: data, by ensuring efficient data backup and recovery schemes.

“(Oracle will provide) the right solutions for the right tasks” through its multi-tiered pyramid storage design that may use flash storage, performance disk, capacity disk and tape storage.

The multi-tiered strategy, according to Lim, was a challenge to firms to “move to an automated, tiered and unified storage infrastructure” wherein data will be allocated to certain ‘storage pools’.

This strategy uses a four-tiered storage model, with flash memory taking the topmost area of the pyramid ‘tier 0’. That tier provided significant performance in storing “high value information that needs to be captured, analysed and presented at high speed,” said Lim.

‘Tier 1’ uses fibre channel disk systems which Lim revealed, had “high availability with near zero downtime and fast recovery.” Meanwhile, ‘tier 2’ makes use of “low cost, high capacity disks, with the capability to manage…databases, backup, email, and file systems.”

‘Tier 3’ which takes up much of the base of the pyramid scheme, uses the tape technology which Lim described to be “most cost effective.” Tape storage can receive “high volume archival data for regulatory purposes.”

Lim explained that clients will be assigning data to their appropriate ‘pools’ after classifying them into four categories: 1) I/O intensive data would be placed in tier 0, 2) mission critical data like revenue and customer-based applications would be assigned to tier 1, 3) vital data which does not require immediate recovery for the business to continue its operations will be sent to tier 2, while 4) archival data which will not be accessed for a long period will be taken to tier 3.

Small and medium businesses (SMBs), Lim said, could “start small and as they grow, we can provide support.” He added that their product offerings were “scalable, simple and easy to manage” as they offered both hardware and software solutions.

Telecommunication companies would most likely benefit from such IT services, Lim explained, saying that they provided support for mission critical environments for various industries.

“Oracle is unique,” said Lim, explaining that they can provide both hardware and software. “Thus our new tagline ‘Hardware and Software: Engineered to work together.’”

Oracle serves around 15,000 clients worldwide.

Originally posted 3:10 pm | Tuesday, May 24th, 2011