Technological innovation tends to come in waves, particularly for transformative concepts such as virtualization. The business advantages of virtualization have continued to drive its adoption as well as spur new advances and new usages, including enabling an efficient infrastructure for the cloud. This has resulted in multiple waves of virtualization, each building on the capabilities and business drivers of the previous wave.

This paper describes how these trends affected storage technologies and how Oracle’s storage solutions enable organizations to reduce IT costs, accelerate provisioning of private cloud services and achieve higher service levels.