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 by the cost savings. Grossman told internetnews.com Apple’s
cost per gigabyte is $2.22 cents 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.