Sat 28 Oct 2006
There’s the old adage …
“If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
I’ve counseled others with that same advice. But now, I find myself frequently fighting that very conception – most recently, this past week at Oracle Open World.
On Monday, I had the opportunity to present NetApp’s Snapshot and FlexClone technologies and their role in supporting rapid application development (RAD) methodologies for database development, test, and QA:
S283383: “Reducing Time to Deployment: Improving Agility for Database Development, Test, QA, and Migration”
Rapidly creating copies of production and test databases for use in a variety of development, test, quality assurance, and migration scenarios is fundamental to today’s application development lifecycle. This session reviews traditional and emerging approaches to “database cloning” and demonstrates how space and time-efficient copies, such as Network Appliance’s FlexClone technology, can drastically reduce time to deployment and improve business agility for Oracle Applications and other database-centric application development.
I had written previously on this topic in NetApp’s Tech OnTap - a monthly newsletter aimed at IT professionals that implement and manage NetApp storage technology. And I’ve spoken on many occasions with NetApp customers about the ways in which these technologies can transform database development.
So once again, after describing how NetApp’s underlying storage system (WAFL) works, and explaining how Snapshot and FlexClone technologies leverage that implementation for space-efficient, near-instantaneous copies of file systems and LUNs, I proceeded to explain how NetApp customers can make working copies of multi-hundred gigabyte databases nearly instantaneously (a few minutes) without consuming any additional storage.
You’d have thought I was selling snake oil! As often happens, the discussion was met with a range of responses, from keen interest — because, if true (which it is!), it can revolutionize the manner in which database development is done — to Missouri-like healthy skepticism.
I guess I should have felt slighted, when, after my presentation a number of attendees came to the front of the room - not to discuss the topic with me, but to speak with a young woman who had volunteered the fact that she was a NetApp customer, and in fact had experienced some of these effects in her organization.
But I’ve experience this reaction before - and fully expect that I’ll continue to experience it in the future.
After all, it really does seem too good to be true …
References
[1] “A Thorough Introduction to FlexClone(tm) Volumes”, NetApp TR-3347.
[3] “DB2: Cloning a Database using NetApp FlexClone(tm) Technology”, NetApp TR-3460.