In games such as bridge and poker, where a number of hands are played over time, no one has an absolute single strong hand (in terms of high cards); the overall winner is the player who has a relatively high number of "good" hands (that is, a better hand than the other players).
Oracle’s strength as a vendor lies in customers with a strong commitment to the company’s core products (most of which are not storage). But the company’s argument, and it is a strong card, is that applications, data and storage, which have traditionally been separated, now require tighter alignment for optimal performance.
Leveraging expertise across the elements of the hardware and software components of the information infrastructure can improve both performance and efficiency. Oracle feels that it has superior application and data knowledge that it can integrate with storage, and it claims that conventional storage system vendors do not have the expertise necessary to tie everything together efficiently.
Although Oracle recognizes that its claims do not apply in all business or IT cases, it makes the bold assertions that applications can run up to 10 times faster with only a tenth of the amount of storage used in conventional systems--and, oh, by the way, that queries may run up to 70 times faster. This strategy is intriguing, but it is a lot like a "savings-of-up-to-75% sale," where the cost of at least one item is reduced by three quarters while most other product prices are reduced by only a little.
The question that customers have to ask and answer clearly is what these performance and capacity benefits mean in their particular environments--a lot or a little. The company is pushing the concept that its software runs better with Oracle storage, such as guaranteed storage performance on demand. So any CIO in a heavily Oracle-based IT shop has to at least give the company the opportunity to present its case, such as using an Exadata Database Machine incorporating integrated Oracle storage.
Oracle is essentially making a back-to-the-future trend. In the past, servers and storage were thought to need tight coupling in a direct-attached storage (DAS) mode with a single vendor’s hardware. That myth was dispelled when innovative storage-focused vendors like EMC started displacing server vendors’ storage even before shared storage in the form of storage area networks (SANs) arrived.
