Data Management Solutions West Midlands

Why You Should Be Running Your Oracle Applications On NetApp

When choosing high-performance hardware to host Oracle databases there are dozens of options – so why choose to run your Oracle applications on NetApp? Here are three compelling reasons why NetApp stands out from the crowd.

1. Easy and fast

NetApp hardware has been built with the cloud in mind. Extensive Ansible and Kubernetes integration allow for advanced infrastructure automation. And thanks to native cloud support, you can scale in any direction – on-premise or into the cloud. Similarly, you can move your Oracle database in any direction to take advantage of the environment that best suits your needs.

This scalability is complemented by lightning-fast infrastructure speed powered by all-flash arrays. You can provision a database in just 44 seconds – and reduce time to market by 30%. NetApp takes speed and turns it into a measurable business benefit.

2. Consolidation potential

NetApp hardware presents as a single, seamless platform using the ONTAP management software for ultimate visibility. Lacking this level of integration, other platforms exacerbate the problem of data silos.

As a single platform, you can consolidate workloads with policy-based quality of service to ensure optimised performance. Indeed, consolidation can help to reduce hardware requirements, shrinking footprint by increasing the amount of physical storage you can squeeze into each rack. Power consumption drops by up to 15 times, providing cost savings during the current energy crisis and an opportunity to improve the sustainability credentials of your data centre – and business.

In fact, NetApp can reduce the overall costs of your Oracle database storage by up to 60%.

3. Security and availability as standard

The seamless transition between on-premise and cloud simplifies data transfer, allowing for the easy creation of a zero-data-loss solution. When deployed and configured correctly, NetApp has been proven to deliver 99.9999% availability. And as you would expect from a zero-loss solution, storage fails over automatically in the event of a disruption, ensuring your Oracle database is always available and that you can meet your SLAs.

Scalability and availability combine to provide exceptional agility. Data can be backed up and restored in a matter of seconds – even your petabyte-scale databases. And thanks to the always-on nature of all-flash arrays, upgrades and maintenance can be performed while the storage system stays online to deliver zero downtime.

A smarter all-round choice

Not all high-availability storage is the same – particularly when hosting your mission-critical Oracle databases. By providing a seamless, cloud-ready platform, NetApp is streets ahead of the competition, offering exceptional performance, scalability, availability and resilience – and an opportunity to reduce running costs without compromising the performance of your databases.

To learn more about the opportunities provided by running your Oracle applications on NetApp all-flash arrays and how they could help your business meet its strategic goals, please give us a call.

Data Management Solutions Birmingham

Unleash the power of your data with Oracle on NetApp all-flash

NetApp and Oracle have worked together for more than a decade to develop next-generation solutions for their clients. But what are the actual benefits of running Oracle workloads on NetApp all-flash systems?

1. Increase speed of innovation

Speed of business and your ability to adapt to change is at the heart of successful digital transformation. Modernising infrastructure with all-flash NetApp systems can accelerate project delivery by as much as 30% over traditional disk-based storage.

This performance gain can be used in several ways. Your business could shorten development times using NetApp FlexClone to clone large volumes for testing and development in seconds without consuming vast amounts of available storage. Or you could use ONTAP to scale workloads seamlessly as your demands change.

NetApp provides a range of tools and technologies to help you do more with your Oracle workloads.

2. Provide a consistent customer experience

Customers now prioritise the quality of service over almost any other factor when making a purchase. Customer service consistency is, therefore, a strategic priority.

NetApp AFS arrays deliver up to one million IOPS with a latency of just 100 milliseconds. These speeds dramatically reduce application response times, so that your employees can retrieve and use data more quickly.

NetApp systems also offer 99.9999% availability, ensuring that your Oracle databases are online 24/7 for both internal and customer-facing operations. Factor in NetApp’s automated node recovery functionality and you have a robust, high-performing platform that allows you to deliver on customer demands.

3. Simplify operations and lower TCO

Oracle databases are complex and expensive to operate. To reduce the total cost of ownership – and to improve return on investment – your business needs to simplify management and maintenance of the database environment.

One of the key goals of the Oracle – NetApp partnership has always been to reduce TCO. Solutions built on NetApp all-flash storage arrays can streamline operations to deliver 90% time and effort savings over existing systems. NetApp technologies like Active IQ monitor usage to accurately predict your future capacity requirements; these accurate, automated calculations ensure that you never under- or over-provision, to prevent unnecessary hardware spend.

In the cloud or on-premises, NetApp offers the lowest £/Mbps for all-flash arrays. Which makes NetApp storage hardware a smarter choice for your Oracle workloads than other vendors.

Ready to learn more about running Oracle workloads on NetApp all-flash arrays? Give the WTL team a call today and we’ll help you understand exactly what your business can achieve.

 

Data Management Storage West Midlands

How to realise the lowest latencies for your enterprise applications

When it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, every microsecond counts. As well as ensuring you have sufficient processing power, it is essential that you remove latency from every layer of your technology stack.

As you would expect when dealing with enormous data sets, choice of storage is critical. For cutting edge AI models to operate optimally, you will need cutting edge storage to underpin it. And this is where the NetApp AFF A-series comes into its own.

All Flash Arrays – obviously

Flash storage currently outperforms any other medium, so it is the natural choice for mission-critical operations. As the name implies – AFF – the NetApp A-series is an all-flash array, using high speed SSD drives to deliver up to 1.4 million IOPS.

No other storage medium is suitable for processing mission-critical applications involving large data sets – up to 702.7PB with the NetApp AFF family. And with native de-duplication, compression and compacting, these systems ensure your storage space is maximised, increasing return on investment and lowering total cost of ownership.

NVMe for maximum throughput

You can further reduce latency by accelerating data transfer between storage and CPU. The NetApp A-Series systems offers NVMe/TCP for connection to existing ethernet infrastructure. Alternatively, double IOPS potential and halve latency the latency found in traditional channel connections with NVMe/FC. Whichever you choose, NVMe connectivity will also allow you to attach ultra-high-performance storage to your existing SAN without disrupting operations to achieve up to 300GB/s throughput.

Flexible connectivity options

In the modern hybrid cloud operating environment, your business needs seamless connectivity to on- and off-premises systems. In addition to high-speed NVMe, the A-series also offers a complete range of alternative technologies including iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, SMB, Amazon S3.

This means that A-series systems will slot directly into your existing infrastructure. You can take advantage of ultra-high performance SSD storage for local processing and off-load lower priority workloads to low-cost secondary systems or cloud platforms.

Scalability

In addition to support for external services, the NetApp A-series is also fully scalable. As your demands increase, the system scales to 24 nodes for a maximum total capacity of 702.7PB of high resilience, high performance all flash storage.

And as you would expect, the A-series is fully supported by ONTAP software to simplify the process of managing and optimising your storage workloads. ONTAP allows you to scale at speed whenever your applications demand.

Find out more

Ready to learn more about the NetApp AFF A-series and how it will help your business achieve its high-performance computing objectives? Get in touch today and our team of storage experts will guide you through the benefits and features so you understand where the A-series fits into your storage strategy.

 

 

 

Artificial Intelligence

All Flash Arrays and Your Artificial Intelligence Future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to become an increasingly important aspect of your operations in the near future. Indeed, AI will help to automate and accelerate many of your core business operations.

However, the choice of technology will also play an important role in ensuring AI delivers on expectations. Here are some factors to consider moving forwards.

Machine Learning, model training and storage

Building and training models takes time, usually because the algorithms need to process vast amounts of data for pattern analysis. Google’s famous Deepmind cancer detection model was trained using images and health records from more than 90,000 patients .

While developing a machine learning model, the primary focus is the accuracy of the results. This means that speed can take a back seat while the data science team tweaks and refines algorithms and verifies that all is working within expected parameters.

During development, low-cost cloud storage or higher latency spinning disk arrays will (normally) be adequate.

Production AI and speed

Once the model moves into production the choice of storage becomes much more important. As well as improving the accuracy of decision-making, AI is intended to accelerate outcomes by performing calculations and inferences more quickly than a human.

This is particularly true when dealing with real-time calculations. In these deployments, speed of storage (and the rest of the infrastructure) will be critical. All-flash storage is the only viable technology available that reduces latency, both at the edge and the core.

Ultimately production Artificial Intelligence systems must be designed to improve data flow at every point of the lifecycle – with the exception of archived records that are retained for auditing or compliance purposes. This information can be stored on lower-performing hardware, like spinning disk arrays or cloud archives to help reduce costs.

AI at the edge

One of the most challenging aspects of AI design is performance at the edge. What needs to be processed and auctioned at the edge, what needs to be passed to the core for action, what can be redirected immediately to the cloud for cold storage?

NetApp Artificial Intelligence solutions have been developed to address these questions, using a tiered approach to data service that automatically directs incoming data to the correct location. Through the use of edge-level analytics, data is processed and categorised in such a way that movement is accelerated, eliminating bottlenecks for the fastest, most efficient AI operations.

For existing NetApp customers, the ability to provision and manage AI storage and infrastructure using familiar ONTAP tools. This allows your business to accelerate deployments and reduce the learning curve so your data science team can focus all their efforts on building a model that delivers true business value.

To learn more about NetApp Artificial Intelligence solutions and how they will help your business meet the challenges of the data-driven future, please get in touch.

NetApp all-flash

Optimise Oracle Workloads with NetApp all-flash Solutions

When it comes to choosing infrastructure to support your line-of-business Oracle databases, Oracle hardware seems the logical choice. But faced by evolving computing needs and shrinking IT budgets what are the alternatives. NetApp all-flash solutions provide a more than viable option to Oracle hardware – well worth considering as you plan the next phase of your infrastructure lifecycle.

Best in class performance

The headline benefit of NetApp all-flash technology is its superior performance. Capable of performing up to 1 million IOPS with latency of about 100 microseconds, NetApp systems are the fastest available – up to 20 times faster than traditional storage. With end-to-end flash arrays and NVMe, these scalable all-flash systems are capable of halving application response times. No other database platform – including Oracle – comes close in terms of performance.

Increasing flexibility and growth options

The hybrid infrastructure operating model solves several problems about latency and security – but the integration between on- and off-premise systems could be improved. NetApp brings the power and flexibility of cloud into the local data centre. The ONTAP data management software bundled with NetApp flash arrays allows you to dynamically allocate your database workloads for maximum performance-cost benefits. This includes pushing lower priority data to cheaper cloud storage to maintain local capacity. NetApp solutions also integrate neatly with Oracle management tools, greatly simplifying administration. Application-integrated workflows can be automated; you can provision and prototype with a single mouse-click in as little as eight seconds. NetApp all flash arrays are also ideal for rapid development and prototyping. FlexClone technology makes it possible to clone large data volumes in seconds. A thin provisioning mechanism means that the data records or files aren’t actually cloned until accessed or used, helping to constrain the physical storage requirements for your test applications.

Consistent and stable operations

NetApp all flash arrays have been engineered to deliver consistently high performance for database operations. They are also extremely reliable averaging just 31.5 seconds pause time per year – that’s 99.9999% availability. This reliability is essential for mission-critical Oracle workloads. Oracle database owners also benefit from SnapShot and SnapMirror technologies that automatically replicate data to prevent loss. Further protection is available using FlexClone to transfer databases to an active disaster recovery site – including the cloud. As well as databases operating at the core, data is protected at the core and in the cloud too.

Streamlined operations and cost savings

Customers using NetApp for Oracle report some significant benefits: fewer components, greater return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership. Estimates suggest time and effort savings of up to 90% compared with their existing solutions. By blurring the boundaries between on-premise and cloud, NetApp arrays make it easy to migrate workloads to wherever they are best suited. This helps to overcome issues of local capacity and avoid the need for costly investment in redundant physical storage.

A worthy alternative option

Thanks to its high performance and reliability, NetApp all flash storage is a credible platform for your most critical Oracle database applications. Factor in the integrated suite of ONTAP management apps and it is easy to see why NetApp users are able to realise such significant returns on their investments.

Useful Links

White Paper: Optimise Oracle Workloads with NetApp Solutions