cloud based solutions west midlands

5 Reasons Why NetApp is the Perfect Platform for Oracle

Choice of infrastructure will have a massive impact on the performance of your Oracle estate – and the repercussions of that choice could last many years. So, as you consider the various options available, here are five ways NetApp will turbo-charge your operations.

1. Unlimited flexibility

Many vendors use inflexibility to lock customers into their ecosystem. And even though hybrid cloud computing is the new norm, some still try to tie their customers to on-premise or on-cloud only.

NetApp takes a different approach allowing you to choose the best of both and to move data seamlessly between your on-premise data centre and any public or private cloud of your choice. This limitless flexibility ensures you can build a platform that perfectly balances performance, scalability and cost.

2. Remarkable performance gains

Underperformance is likely to be one of the motivating factors behind your decision to upgrade infrastructure, but the wrong choice now could limit potential gains. According to NetApp, customers can boost performance by up to 20 times (20,000%!) with the right hardware choices.

Importantly, these gains can be realised on existing applications too, maximising the value of your new infrastructure investment and reducing TCO of legacy apps.

3. Accelerated development

Infrastructure performance also has a significant effect on development cycles. The slower things get, the longer it takes to provision resources and copy data, forcing the dev team to wait.

NetApp offers a range of innovative features, like parallel copies and backups, that can prepare a full development environment – including data – in just 15 minutes.

4. Reduced TCO

As your IT estate expands, so does the total cost of ownership (TCO). More hardware directly equates to increased capital and operational spending.

With innovative deduplication and compression technologies, along with seamless transfer to the cloud, NetApp can help streamline physical hardware assets. This functionality results in time and effort savings of up to 90%, immediately reducing TCO against existing solutions.

5. Infinite scalability

The wrong infrastructure can leave your business stuck with poorly performing hardware and reduces options for growth as your needs change. Change is inevitable – and you must have Oracle infrastructure to support it.

With NetApp, you benefit from limitless scalability, both on-premise and in the cloud. More than just increasing capacity, NetApp hardware allows you to take advantage of new technologies like NVMe and AI to further increase the functionality and longevity of your Oracle infrastructure investment/.

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Choosing NetApp for your Oracle infrastructure makes sense. Not only is it cost-effective, but your business benefits from cumulative savings and reduced TCO over the long term.

To learn more about the NetApp advantage, please give the WTL a call  to discuss your Oracle needs.

Data Management Birmingham

10 Reasons To Choose NetApp For Oracle Applications

Infrastructure choice has the potential to make your IT environment acceptable or world-beating. Here are ten reasons why NetApp is the smartest solution for your Oracle applications.

1. Zero downtime

NetApp storage has been proven to deliver 99.9999% availability consistently. Factor in automatic storage failover and you can be sure that your mission-critical Oracle applications will always be available as downtime becomes a thing of the past.

2. Next-generation performance

Built around NVMe/FC technologies (an industry first), NetApp SANs deliver market-leading performance, reducing latency and increasing predictability and scalability. With an exponential performance gain, you will be better able to serve the data-driven needs of your users and customers.

3. Sub-one-minute DR

NetApp allows you to backup and restore petabyte-scale Oracle databases in a matter of seconds. So you can recover operations in less than a minute should something go wrong.

4. Zero loss as standard

Data protection is built into every layer of NetApp infrastructure – edge, core and cloud. No matter where your data is stored, you know it is fully protected against loss at all times.

5. Maximised storage potential

NetApp offers advanced storage efficiency technologies to optimise your data footprint. This means no more wasted capacity or spending caused by storing duplicate data unnecessarily.

6. Automated storage management

Use policy-based quality of service settings to ensure your mission-critical apps have automatic access to the resources required for maximum performance. Smarter, automated optimisation allows you to maximise resource usage – and to safely run production and development environments on the same shared hardware.

7. Simplified provisioning

NetApp tools can automate and accelerate provisioning allowing your developers to bring new products and features into production faster. By reducing the manual effort required to provision your environment, developers and operators can devote more of their resources and time to the strategic projects which will drive your business forwards.

8. Future-ready infrastructure

Native integration with Ansible and Kubernetes allows your team to build service-oriented technologies faster. And with tools to move data seamlessly between on-premise and cloud locations, your applications can be migrated quickly according to your changing business needs.

9. Native multi-cloud integration

Achieve your optimal cost/performance balance with tools to move workloads across on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Take control of your storage spend using simplified tools to migrate to wherever offers the best value at any moment in time.

10. Optimised efficiency

Clear reporting and benchmarking tools allow you to quickly and easily understand resource usage and costs. You can use these insights to make smarter strategic decisions that maximise budget and operational efficiency.

Taken together, these ten benefits underscore why NetApp is the ideal choice for your Oracle applications.

Ready to learn more about your Oracle apps on NetApp? Give the WTL team a call today to discuss what it could mean for you.

Data Management Solutions West Midlands

Oracle On NetApp – Real World Experiences

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

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.