Whenever any technology company releases a new product or update, it is accompanied by bold, eye-catching benchmarks. Knowing that speed is critical to operations, most vendors will publish data suggesting exponential gains over previous releases.
But benchmark testing is usually conducted under optimised conditions in a lab. Every potential factor is tweaked to provide the very best performance. And all too often these lab tests are nothing like the real-world operating environments of most businesses.
So when NetApp claims to offer market-leading performance for Oracle databases., how does that match up to reality?
A report by Evaluator Group looked at two organisations using NetApp ONTAP on Oracle. The first was a large healthcare provider operating a medical record system for 300 distributed offices. The second was a technology infrastructure supplier of hardware, software and cloud computing resources.
This is what they found.
Simplified data protection and backup
The healthcare provider operates a 100TB database on Oracle. This was part of a larger data warehouse environment that relied on ETL processes to move data between systems.
Under their previous multi-vendor infrastructure, Oracle RMAN backups ran forever – sometimes failing to finish at all. This created the potential for permanent data loss when backups did not complete.
Following migration to Oracle on NetApp ONTAP, the company shifted their backup strategy to use FlexClone. This relatively simple change reduced database copy and distribution times from “potentially forever” to a matter of minutes. Data can be copied and cloned quickly and easily, reducing the risk of data loss caused by failed backups.
Ultrafast disaster recovery provisions
The IT infrastructure provider has a similarly complex set-up, with five data centres holding 100PB of raw data in 375 applications and 418 databases. By implementing NetApp ONTAP, they have been able to dramatically simplify and accelerate their disaster recovery and backup provisions.
Testing of their new NetApp infrastructure reveals they can:
- Backup a database in 5 minutes
- Restore a database in 5 minutes
- Refresh a system in 15 minutes
- Synchronise their disaster recovery platforms in 10 minutes
Whether these speeds match NetApp’s own benchmarks is debatable – but for the two companies described here, the improvements have been impressive. Not only are they able to complete backup and disaster recovery operations quicker, but their businesses (and data) are safer as a result.
If you want to know more about these specific use cases, you can read the Evaluator Group report here.
And if you would like to know more about how NetApp ONTAP can help turbocharge your Oracle databases, please give the WTL team a call