Storage vendor EMC has expanded its portfolio of consulting services and best-practice documents by adding offerings designed to help Oracle customers transition to private-cloud environments.

Mark Peters, an Enterprise Strategy Group analyst, said in a statement that enterprises often look to their vendors for best ways to tackle their specific challenges. "The EMC/Oracle relationship is an example of how this need can be met further with onsite experts who can apply practical analysis to improve architectures as well as proven interoperability among key technologies to get the most out of investments in every way possible," he commented."

The new consulting services, offered by the EMC Consulting division, are designed to help customers optimize their environments through tiered storage and active archiving. They also include assistance with using performance metrics to plan and build business intelligence and performance management systems, implementation of data visualization solutions, collection and management of data for reporting and analytics when designing and implementing a data warehouse, as well as development of plans, architecture design and assessment of readiness for transition to a virtualized application environment.

The new EMC Proven solutions are in the form of written guidance for technology best practices to help IT professionals deploy Oracle business applications and VMware's virtualization solutions. The documents are based on testing conducted by EMC engineers of several specific use-case scenarios.

The scenarios include rapid deployment and scale-out for Oracle's E-Buisness suite on EMC's RecoverPoint and Replication Manager and VMware's vSphere;EMC's Fast Cache product with Oracle OLTP database applications;EMC IT migration to the Oracle BI Grid;virtual provisioning on EMC Symmetrix VMAX with Oracle Database 10g and 11g;and several others.