EMC and Oracle Accelerate Joint Services Strategy

EMC Corp. and Oracle Corp. entered the second phase of a services agreement this week that was formed in late 2002. The two storage heavyweights have been working together on joint projects since 1995.

The two companies announced Tuesday that EMC’s Global Services unit has teamed with Oracle Consulting to bring the ‘Oracle on EMC Database Accelerator Service’ to market in North America and worldwide by the beginning of 2003.

The EMC Database Accelerator Service is designed to provide service support and consulting to new and existing clients using EMC storage systems, software, and networks running with Oracle databases.

The launch of this new service comes on the heels of a similar project, the Joint Service Center, a center staffed by engineers from both companies that was launched in September 2002 as a problem resolution resource.

The Joint Service Center will provide back-end support to Oracle and EMC storage solutions that generate from the EMC Database Accelerator Service, the company said.

The two companies also unveiled a jointly developed and supported cloning environment for creating “non-disruptive” copies of Oracle 11i Application environments.

Supported by EMC’s TimeFinder software, which creates multiple copies of data within a single storage system, and Oracle’s Automatic System Configuration utility, customers can create a clone of their application for general maintenance, testing purposes, upgrades, backup and recovery, and hardware migrations without interrupting production systems and business operations.

Unlike database clones, application clones are not just database copies, said a spokesperson for Oracle. Key application information in both the database and application layers must also be copied in order to make the clone usable.

“As companies increasingly use a single, integrated enterprise application suite to run their entire business, the ability to create an exact duplicate of their business information, while the original remains online, becomes a key requirement,” the company stated.

Demonstrations of EMC and Oracle co-projects are being demonstrated at the annual Oracle AppsWorld conference in San Diego this week, and at EMC Global Solution Centers in Japan, Massachusetts, and Ireland.