In this multicloud and cognitive era, information continues to grow rapidly. By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow by 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data in data centers as in the cloud. IT environments with Oracle deployments will need to accommodate that data growth, including storing, copying, mirroring, and protecting the data. When IT budgets are constrained but data keeps growing, storage costs can consume more than their fair share of the IT budget. The leading-edge portfolio of storage solutions and essential technologies of IBM® can help organizations stay ahead of the information explosion. Designed with built-in efficiency, these solutions represent preferred practices that address the following main storage objectives for hybrid multicloud environments: Stop storing so much Store more with what you have. Move Oracle and related data to balance performance and efficiency IBM offers true enterprise class storage support for Oracle deployments at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). With flash disk, tape, storage network hardware, consolidated management console, software-defined storage solutions, and security software, IBM can provide Oracle customers the full spectrum of products to meet their availability, retention, security, and compliance requirements.

Dynamic organizations want to accelerate growth while reducing costs. To do so, they must speed the deployment of business applications and adapt quickly to any changes in priorities. Organizations today require an IT infrastructure that is easy, efficient, and versatile. The VersaStack solution by Cisco and IBM® can help you accelerate the deployment of your data centers. It reduces costs by more efficiently managing information and resources while maintaining your ability to adapt to business change. The VersaStack solution combines the innovation of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with the efficiency of the IBM Storwize® storage system. The Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure includes the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco Nexus and Cisco MDS switches, and Cisco UCS Director. The IBM FlashSystem® V9000 enhances virtual environments with its Data Virtualization, IBM Real-time CompressionTM, and IBM Easy Tier® features. These features deliver extraordinary levels of performance and efficiency. The VersaStack solution is Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) ready. Your IT team can build, deploy, secure, and maintain applications through a more agile framework. Cisco Intercloud Fabric capabilities help enable the creation of open and highly secure solutions for the hybrid cloud. These solutions accelerate your IT transformation while delivering dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and simplicity. Cisco and IBM are global leaders in the IT industry. The VersaStack solution gives you the opportunity to take advantage of integrated infrastructure solutions that are targeted at enterprise applications, analytics, and cloud solutions. The VersaStack solution is backed by Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) to provide faster delivery of applications, greater IT efficiency, and less risk. This IBM Redbooks® publication is aimed at experienced storage administrators who are tasked with deploying a VersaStack solution with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and IBM SpectrumTM Protect.

In this multicloud and cognitive era, information continues to grow rapidly. By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow by 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data in data centers as in the cloud. IT environments with Oracle deployments will need to accommodate that data growth, including storing, copying, mirroring, and protecting the data. When IT budgets are constrained but data keeps growing, storage costs can consume more than their fair share of the IT budget. The leading-edge portfolio of storage solutions and essential technologies of IBM® can help organizations stay ahead of the information explosion. Designed with built-in efficiency, these solutions represent preferred practices that address the following main storage objectives for hybrid multicloud environments: Stop storing so much Store more with what you have. Move Oracle and related data to balance performance and efficiency IBM offers true enterprise class storage support for Oracle deployments at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). With flash disk, tape, storage network hardware, consolidated management console, software-defined storage solutions, and security software, IBM can provide Oracle customers the full spectrum of products to meet their availability, retention, security, and compliance requirements.

The purpose of this IBM® Redpaper® document is to provide best practice guidelines to design and implement IBM FlashSystem® storage for database workloads. The recommended settings and values are based on lab testing, proof of concept (PoC) and experience drawn from customer implementations. Suggestions that are presented in this document are applicable to most production database environments to increase performance of I/O and availability. However, more considerations might be required while designing, configuring, and implementing storage for extreme transactional, analytical, and database cluster environments. Customers are migrating database storage to IBM FlashSystem largely due to low latency performance of the IBM FlashSystem family of Storage. Using IBM FlashSystem, IBM customers are able to achieve low latency for queries and transactions from milliseconds to microseconds, realize a multi-fold increase in application level transactions per second, increase CPU efficiency and reduce database licensing costs. Recent additions of data reduction technologies to IBM FlashSystem further increase overall TCO benefits. All IBM FlashSystem models now offer compression, which can reduce database storage by 40 - 80% depending on database software. In addition to best practices that are described in this document, the IBM FlashSystem Worldwide Solutions Engineering Team can further assist customers with performing analysis of current database workloads for IBM FlashSystem benefits, perform PoCs at our labs, and help with implementation.