Apple Meets Oracle’s Storage Approval

With Apple by its side, Oracle will begin offering a flexible storage strategy catering to customers concerned about cutting the costs associated with saving data.

While Oracle spokespeople would not confirm it, company officials will announce the Resilient Low-Cost Storage Initiative at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week.

The strategy is part of Oracle’s bid for offering high-availability software and hardware at less cost than database competitors Microsoft and IBM.

Oracle used Apple’s Xserve RAID server in product testing in its corporate offices for 4,000 users, according to Alex Grossman, director of server and storage and hardware at Apple.

After testing it with a Fibre Channel protocol, Oracle told Apple officials it was impressed by how well it worked and how much they were able to save. Grossman told internetnews.com that Apple’s cost per gigabyte is $2.22, while other storage vendors might cost companies $4 per gigabyte.

At the heart of the initiative lies Oracle’s 10g Database grid technology for shuffling and storing data around computer networks with relative ease. Oracle plans to propose that customers use 10g in concert with serial ATA disk-based storage arrays.

SATA costs less than traditional Fibre Channel machines. It is an important protocol as vendors increasingly move to offer tiered storage as a crucial part of information lifecycle management , which allows files to be managed from their inception until their disposal.

Oracle’s plan for a low-cost array calls for networked storage, remote management, failure alerts, interoperability certification and high availability through low-cost fault tolerance.

High availability is huge on Oracle’s check list of perks for customers. In a presentation at Oracle OpenWorld, Juan Loaiza, vice president of systems technologies at Oracle, made the case for a shift from mainframes from the likes of IBM to modular servers using Oracle 10g technology.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com