Dell and Oracle build on relationship

Dell has announced new and enhanced infrastructure, software and services offerings designed to help organisations maximise performance of traditional IT and cloud environments running on Dell infrastructure and drive business innovation. The offerings demonstrate continued customer enthusiasm for the expanded Dell and Oracle relationship to deliver comprehensive, end-to-end solutions.

The relationship of Dell and Oracle represents a joining of forces between two industry-leaders with nearly unrivaled reach and scale. Dell provides award-winning hardware, software and services along with strengths in enterprise and midmarket organisations around the globe, and Oracle offers the number one enterprise database and enterprise applications portfolio. The new Dell solutions introduced today help organisations enhance and optimise their businesses and manage applications faster with increased performance, flexibility and value at every scale.

Dell Set to Deliver New Levels of Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Today Dell demonstrated integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager that will enable customers to uniquely manage their infrastructure stack, Oracle Database and Applications from a single management console. By tightly integrating Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c with Dell OpenManage, customers can use a single interface for a complete view of their infrastructure – from hardware to the workloads and applications on top – to maximise performance, achieve operational effectiveness and improve resource optimisation.

Oracle Enterprise Manager has helped customers monitor and manage their Oracle workloads in traditional and cloud environments for years. The planned integration with Dell OpenManage, leveraging unique agent-free embedded management on Dell’s award-winning x86 PowerEdge servers, means that customers will be able to monitor Dell servers, storage and networking infrastructures directly in the Oracle Enterprise Manager console, helping Oracle administrators quickly understand the top to bottom performance of their applications in a single tool they already recognise.
The integrated solution will enable organisations to have visibility into their Dell infrastructure while providing a side-by-side view of the Oracle databases present on the hardware. This new level of visibility and integration will help ensure optimised performance and increase application service levels by allowing customers to significantly reduce the time to resolution when dealing with complex problems.

“Our relationship with Oracle is about simplifying IT and pre-engineering solutions to work together to reduce integration costs for customers, and enabling them to stand up applications more quickly,” said Samuel Greenblatt, chief architect and technologist, Dell Enterprise Solutions Group. “The engineering work between Oracle and Dell demonstrates how we’re helping customers achieve that vision.”

"Customers of all sizes are demanding more than ever that their technology vendors’ work together to remove the pain of systems integration before the products arrive at their site. This is true of hardware, software and the applications and databases associated with the infrastructure," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. "In broad and deep partnership with Oracle, Dell is answering the bell differently than others in the industry and working hard to engineer its infrastructure to offer customers the best possible experience - from time to deployment to simplifying vital day-to-day tasks such as systems management. We expect more and more customers to take note of the deepening relationship between the two companies."

Dell Introduces New Dell Active Infrastructure for Oracle
Dell also introduced Dell Active Infrastructure for Oracle. These newly optimised reference architectures are based on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM running on leading converged infrastructure solutions from Dell. Customers can now obtain first-call support from Dell Services and purchase and renew Oracle Linux and Oracle VM support services directly from Dell, simplifying the point of contact for customers.

Dell Active Infrastructure for Oracle is based on years of collaboration, in-depth testing and validation between the companies. These solutions provide a centralised source for hardware, software, services and consulting to help customers speed time to productivity, maximise efficiency and strengthen the IT quality of their business.

Dell Reaffirms Commitment to Oracle Database Management with Enhanced Software Solutions
In order to help businesses of all sizes better manage information and get more value from their Oracle implementations, Dell Software has updated its Toad™ for Oracle and SharePlex™ solutions to deliver a host of capabilities. With one of the industry’s largest and most committed user groups, including more than 3 million annual visitors to its Toad World community, Dell Software has ranked as the leading vendor for development and optimisation of Oracle and other leading databases.

Dell Software’s flagship database development and administration solution, Toad for Oracle enables developers, DBAs and analysts of all skill and experience levels to work efficiently and accurately. The latest release delivers support for Oracle Database 12c, and delivers a host of new functionalities including multi-tenancy, diagnostic messaging, upgraded ETL capabilities, code refactoring, enhanced data analysis and provisioning, and others that enrich the overall Toad user experience. In addition, Dell Software has announced the release of Toad ? Mac Edition, the latest addition to the Toad product family. A no-cost, native Mac application, Toad ? Mac Edition provides essential database development functionality for Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL to boost user productivity.

A leading Oracle-to-Oracle data replication solution that now also supports near real-time data integration to a variety of leading structured and unstructured databases, SharePlex has been enhanced to provide full replication support for Oracle Database 12c. SharePlex users can now migrate data from existing Oracle databases to their new Oracle Database 12c implementations, while also replicating data from Oracle Database 12c to a host of heterogeneous databases. In addition, with the newly released SharePlex Connector for Hadoop, Dell Software now enables near real-time replication from Oracle databases, including Oracle Database 12c, directly to Hadoop HDFS and HBase environments, helping customers drive improved business intelligence and big data analytics.

“For nearly two decades, customers have depended on Dell’s software solutions to manage their Oracle database environments,” said Darin Bartik, executive director, product management for Dell Software’s information management solution. “By delivering robust support for Oracle Database 12c in Toad and SharePlex, we’re reaffirming our commitment to providing end-to-end solutions that enrich customers’ overall Oracle experience. In addition, with the launch of SharePlex Connector for Hadoop, we’re giving Oracle customers the ability to more seamlessly manage data and information across increasingly complex environments.”

Agile Product Lifecycle Management
Dell Services has introduced a suite of end-to-end services for large- and medium-scale implementations of Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution to help customers maximise returns on their Oracle investments and reduce new product development time. Dell’s comprehensive suite of services includes strategic consulting, implementation, upgrades, process improvement, custom development, integration, testing and support services.

Leveraging best practices from its successful internal implementation of Oracle’s Agile PLM, Dell has developed solutions that cut down implementation cycle time and deliver enhanced business value to customers. The areas addressed by these solutions include software lifecycle and release management, business intelligence for product data and supplier collaboration via a supplier portal with a secured framework.

Dell Integrated Solutions Kit (DISK) is a bundle of these solutions with a plug-and-play option aligned to Oracle’s product maturity. Customers can choose the solutions they need and save significant time in implementing some of the widely used solutions. Dell also offers PLM-as-a-Service for mid-market customers who want hosting services for Oracle’s Agile PLM and an Android-based mobility solution to access product data, approve business critical changes and get notifications on the go.

“We have implemented Oracle’s Agile PLM suite internally for the lifecycle management of our own products,” said Ramki Ramamurthy, vice president and global head, Applications Services, Dell. “Our in-depth knowledge of the tool’s capabilities and business processes makes us an ideal partner for customers looking to make the most of their Agile PLM environments.”