Darryl Smith, the chief database architect for EMC’s IT organization, stopped by Wikibon headquarters to share his insights into managing large-scale Oracle deployments.

Smith starts the interview by providing a little background about himself. He has worked with Oracle databases since 1988, and today he is is responsible for protecting, maintaining and future-proofing EMC’s massive database environment. He explains that most mission-critical applications are powered by Oracle databases because the company’s software excels in ingesting high volume transactional data.

A growing number of Oracle shops are virtualizing their environments in an effort to reduce licensing costs and address growing data volumes. The latter trend is making data protection increasingly difficult, especially as far as backup is concerned.

Smith points out that the traditional approach of bringing databases offline and manually copying files to tape is no longer viable. EMC has adapted its backup process by cloning production databases to proxy servers that are later copied to business continuity sites.

Many DBAs are forced to perform risky incremental backups in order to conserve disk space. According to Smith, his division has worked around this problem by leveraging Data Domain appliances with built-in dedupe and compression functionality to reduce storage requirements. He adds that backup files should be stored locally for a number of reasons, including compliance requirements and the complexity of migrating data from a remote location.

The architect changes the topic to availability, and highlights that the ability to restore databases within three to five minutes is essential for high availability. Virtualization lets admins perform rapid restores for a fraction of the cost of Oracle’s Real Application Clusters (RACs.)

Smith tells theCube host Dave Vellante that in-memory databases such as Pivotal Labs’ SQLFire enable enterprises to drive down overhead by reducing the number of cores in their environments. To this end, EMC leverages SQLFire as a front-end for the Oracle environment that powers its integration layer.

Click the video below for the full highlights from the interview, including Smith’s take on the cost-performance ratio of all-flash arrays.