STORAGE

3PAR announced that, in partnering with Oracle as a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork, it has established significant gains in database performance, storage utilization and management by deploying Oracle Database 10g with Automatic Storage Management in conjunction with 3PAR InServ Storage Servers and 3PAR Thin Provisioning. With this combination, 3PAR has demonstrated benefits that include major simplification and automation of database and storage management, high database performance through massive parallelism and load balancing, and massively improved storage utilization. By significantly improving storage utilization and operational efficiency, the 3PAR Utility Storage solution integrated with Oracle Database 10g addresses two of the most costly pain points for customers deploying databases in today's traditional infrastructures. The powerful and successfully tested combination of Oracle and 3PAR Thin Provisioning allows customers to rapidly provision storage in a one-time step to meet long-term database growth needs--therefore eliminating the planning, management overhead and downtime traditionally associated with adding capacity to applications. Also, with 3PAR Thin Provisioning, physical storage is only allocated as data is actually written. Enterprise studies show that users typically purchase 4x the capacity physically utilized by their applications, resulting in significant waste and unnecessary cost. 3PAR's "set-it-and-forget-it" storage provisioning reduces capacity purchases, simplifies management and improves availability. Performance is rapid and assured because data is spread finely and evenly over all InServ Storage Server resources. To assist customers with deployment of the Oracle and 3PAR solution, best practices, test results and benefits are documented in a joint Oracle and 3PAR white paper available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/asm/pdf/oracle_3par_wp_final.pdf. "Increasing complexity threatens to cripple data center operations. If companies are to be competitive, they must turn to solutions that scale rapidly and adjust to the day-to-day demands of the business while optimizing IT resources efficiently and cost-effectively," said Stephanie Balaouras of The Yankee Group. "The Oracle Database 10g and 3PAR Utility Storage solution is just what these companies need to significantly simplify the database and storage environment and enable true utility computing in the data center." "Oracle Database 10g with Automatic Storage Management greatly simplifies the task of deploying databases that are scalable and high performing," said Angelo Pruscino, vice president and architect at Oracle Corp. "Oracle's Automatic Storage Management technology and 3PAR Utility Storage with Thin Provisioning enable rapid and easy deployment of fast databases with high storage utilization. Together, it's an exceptional combination for utility computing datacenters." 3PAR Utility Storage is a simple, efficient and scalable storage platform for utility computing. Now Oracle customers can start with small and affordable storage deployments, provision service levels once and scale within a single system to meet the most demanding projects in the utility data centerincluding storage consolidation and performance-intensive applications. Customers pay only for what they actually use, not for what they allocate or provision to applications. "Our work with Oracle demonstrates once again the many customer benefits that can be realized with 3PAR Utility Storage," said David Scott, 3PAR CEO. "With reduced database and storage management effort, faster database performance, and high storage utilization, the customer is the clear winner. Now that best practices have been established, customers are assured that Oracle Database 10g and 3PAR InServ Storage Servers are the right choice for their utility computing data center."