Steve Manley, CTO of EMC’s Backup and Recovery Systems visited theCube this week during our live event coverage at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, and discussed how his unit and company (in particular VMware) blend into Oracle’s ecosystem.

The discussion with Wikibon’s founder Dave Vellante started with a look into the more significant trends shaping the backup industry.  Manley said virtualized workloads, SAN environments and large scale deployments, where Oracle technology can be found more often than not, are the three biggest influencers in this context.

Manley continued to elaborate on how EMC comes in when traditional techniques no longer provide an efficient method of backing up databases handling large datasets. In particular, so-called lower end or secondary databases are often virtualized in order to facilitate better backup,  and VMware’s dominance in this market means that it’s the choice of most companies.  Vellante noted that Wikibon conducted a study which confirms 50 percent of Oracle shops are using VMware today, and 90 percent will do so on the longer on.

Manley then discussed how EMC and Oracle are competing in some markets, but supplement each other in others. Backup belongs to the latter category, he explained: VMware leverages some Oracle backup techniques in virtualized environments, thus giving these a boost in terms of efficiency.  EMC also provides its dedupe technology to deliver rapid recovery to joint customers.

Further into the conversion Manley talked about how database admins want to be involved in the protection and backup of the data they’re in charge of for various reasons, and that Oracle Recovery Manager, RMAN, offers exactly that. He continued to talk about continuous data protection (CDP), and how this also fits in with some components of an Oracle environment by ensuring more reliable roll backs.

Lastly, Manley closed off by talking a bit about his unit’s integration strategy. He said they recommend disk platforms to customers, DataDomain, and disk optimized software to power the infrastructure.


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