Originally Posted on Pure Storage Blog on 8.27.2018
VLSS is a leading US-based Oracle and VMware consulting company and official Oracle and VMware VAR partner operating primarily in North America and Europe. In this guest blog, Dean Bolton, Chief Architect at VLSS, discusses his experience with and the benefits of Pure’s unique Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle and VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) implementation which streamlines Oracle System Copy and is included at no additional charge with every Pure Storage FlashArray.
CAT for Oracle version 3.0 has been officially released, and it’s delivering a host of features that customers using previous versions have been requesting. The most eye-opening of which is support for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) databases! That’s right, with CAT for Oracle, you can now clone both single-instance and cluster databases in an automated, repeatable manner. Want to do nightly refreshes of your 40 TB production database to test environments? Setup CAT for Oracle and get that refresh done in seconds using the power of Pure Storage snapshots!
If RAC support is the headline, the virtualization enhancements are right behind it. With release 3.0, CAT for Oracle now officially supports physical and virtual environments. On VMware, that means that databases running via RDM or VVols can be copied with CAT for Oracle. Basically, as long as Pure Storage snapshots are aligned with the Oracle datafiles, CAT will work just fine. (Sorry VMFS datastores, that’s a no go, but just storage vMotion to a VVols datastore instead!) With Pure’s VVols implementation enabled through it’s VASA Provider, it is rather simple to set-up in just a few steps and gives you the granularity you need to provision and assign storage policies to your individual Oracle volumes.
Another piece of feedback that we received was that while the initial release of CAT for Oracle was a great platform that allows for extensive customization, it wasn’t as easy as expected to setup for most customers’ needs. So, in the newest release we’ve also included an install script to do a lot of standard configurations. Just answer a few questions about your environment, like source system name, target Oracle SID, etc., and the install script will output configuration files automatically that allows for the immediate execution of a CAT for Oracle database copy. You can download the tool, run the install script and copy a database in less than five minutes!
Summary: CAT for Oracle Version 3.0
Users can save time and money using CAT for Oracle to clone their Oracle databases. CAT for Oracle currently supports both physical and virtual environments for single-instance and clustered database workloads. Contact your Pure Storage sales rep for a demo or learn more about CAT for Oracle.