Is Your Platform Ready for Oracle AI Database 26ai?

Oracle AI Database 26ai is here. The first new, long-term support release for on-prem since 19c. Your DBAs have questions. Your enterprise architects have opinions. Your VP wants to know the risk.

But here’s the question that matters for platform teams. Is your infrastructure ready for what Oracle is becoming?

Every Oracle change carries risk. The upgrade itself. The testing cycles. The cutover. The ongoing operations afterward. Traditional storage adds complexity at each step: capacity planning, performance tuning, migration projects, refresh cycles. That complexity is a tax on every change you make.

Everpure eliminates that tax. Not through a single feature but through architectural simplicity that compounds over time. Year one, you have fast storage. Year five, you have operational confidence built on a platform you’ve mastered, that’s been upgraded without disruption, and that handles workloads that didn’t exist when you deployed it.

The 26ai upgrade is the immediate question. The platform you choose determines how you’ll answer that question, and every question after it—for the next decade.

Oracle 26ai as a Modern Data Platform

Oracle has always handled diverse workloads. What’s changing is how those workloads converge.

  1. The database now runs OLTP, analytics, JSON, graph, and vector search on the same instance. Your storage sees mixed I/O patterns rather than predictable block reads. Consistent performance under variable load matters more than peak IOPS.
  2. Data lake integration is maturing. External tables have existed for years, and hybrid partitioned tables arrived in 19c. But adoption is accelerating as organizations build unified data architectures. DBMS_CLOUD enables direct access to object storage, and Oracle AI Database 26ai adds native support for Apache Iceberg tables. Oracle is becoming a consumer of object storage, not just block.
  3. AI Vector Search introduces new storage patterns. Vector indexes are memory-resident, but the underlying data expands significantly when text is converted to embeddings. Storage capacity planning needs to account for this growth.

For platform teams, this means storage that handles block, file, and object without becoming three separate problems. The Everpure Enterprise Data Cloud delivers exactly that: FlashArray™ for primary workloads, FlashBlade® for backup and object storage, one operational model across both.

The modernization journey

Oracle upgrades are inflection points. You’re touching the environment anyway. If your storage is due for refresh, if your backup architecture is struggling, if you’re modernizing your deployment model, the upgrade is the forcing function to fix multiple problems at once. This is what “platform ready” means—infrastructure that supports every stage of the journey, not just production.

  • Starting from legacy storage. The 26ai upgrade is a natural migration point. One project, two outcomes: new database version and a storage platform that eliminates the complexity tax for the next decade. Migrate production to FlashArray, consolidate backup to FlashBlade, execute the upgrade with instant snapshots and fast restores you didn’t have before.
  • Already on Everpure. You have the tools. Pure1® shows capacity and performance baselines. Snapshots give you instant clones for test environments and proven rollback paths. FlashBlade delivers 65TB/hr restores if you need to recover. The upgrade becomes lower risk because the storage layer is already solved.
  • Running Oracle in the cloud? Everpure Cloud extends the Pure experience to AWS and Azure with up to 50% storage cost reduction, seamless data mobility between on-prem and cloud, and one operational model everywhere. 
  • Modernizing to containers. Maybe you’re running Oracle on Kubernetes, or standing up new services alongside the database. Portworx provides persistent storage for stateful workloads, backup and DR for containerized applications, and data mobility across clusters. The database upgrade and the platform modernization can happen in parallel.The database upgrade and the platform modernization can happen in parallel. For hybrid environments, Everpure Cloud extends the same model to AWS and Azure.

Three starting points, one destination: a unified platform where storage stops being a variable in every project.

  1. Assessment. What’s the current state? Everpure provides actionable assessments that transform raw database metrics into a precise roadmap for migration readiness. Request this assessment. Pure1 provides visibility into capacity, performance baselines, and growth trends across your storage estate. If you’re migrating to Everpure, this becomes your baseline for right-sizing.
  2. Environment preparation. You need dev, test, UAT, and performance environments. FlashArray delivers instant, space-efficient clones. FlashBlade provides fast restores to seed test data. Portworx® enables ephemeral namespaces for containerized workloads. Minutes, not days.
  3. Iterative testing. Run AutoUpgrade, something breaks, fix it, restore, try again. FlashArray snapshots restore in seconds. FlashBlade resets test environments from backup. Portworx PX-Backup handles stateful container recovery. When each iteration costs minutes instead of hours, you test more thoroughly. When testing is thorough, production incidents drop.
  4. Cutover preparation. Snapshot production on FlashArray immediately before cutover. Validate FlashBlade backups for DR. The rollback path is proven before you need it.
  5. Go-live. Execute the cutover. FlashArray delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency. FlashBlade stands ready if catastrophic recovery is needed. Storage isn’t the variable.
  6. Optimize and operate. Evergreen® means controllers upgrade in place, capacity expands without migration, and the platform keeps improving. No forklift refresh. No relearning. The team that runs the 26ai upgrade runs the same platform, better, for the next decade.

Simple, Consistent Performance

Platform teams get asked about performance. Here’s what actually matters for Oracle, and why the answer isn’t just “faster.”

Mission-critical performance for primary workloads

FlashArray//XL™ R5 delivers sub-150µs latency, 45GB/s throughput, 99.9999% availability. Under HammerDB TPROC-C: 2.13 million New Orders Per Minute, 100% improvement over the previous generation, 3x more IOPS per rack unit than competitors.

But every enterprise flash vendor quotes impressive specs. The difference is the tax you pay to achieve them: RAID optimization, LUN alignment, workload isolation tuning. Engineering time on every deployment. Troubleshooting time when something doesn’t perform.

Everpure eliminates it. Performance is consistent by default. Chapman University’s Oracle DBA: “We didn’t know you could believe what a storage vendor told you, until we met Everpure.” Database cloning dropped from a full day to minutes. Storage management time fell by 95%.

Mission-critical scale for resilience SLAs

FlashBlade delivers scalable throughput for Oracle RMAN workloads. A 10TB database restores in under 10 minutes; validated testing showed 65 TB/hour with distributed RMAN channels, scaling with your configuration. Traditional backup appliances optimize for ingest, deduplicating aggressively, which devastates restore performance when you actually need data back. FlashBlade delivers symmetric read/write. SafeMode™ snapshots add ransomware protection: immutable recovery points that can’t be deleted even with admin credentials.

Davenport University experienced this firsthand: 85-90% improvement in Oracle read times, full storage refresh in two hours during business hours, infrastructure footprint reduced from 48 rack units to five.

Unstructured and Semi-structured Data Modernization

FlashBlade provides S3-compatible object storage for DBMS_CLOUD and external table workloads. High throughput for large-scale queries against external data. Same management plane as your primary storage.

Economics

The complexity tax isn’t just operational; it shows up in your budget.

  • Evergreen eliminates the forklift tax. Traditional storage follows a buy-run-replace cycle every three to five years. Each replacement is a project: budget approval, procurement, migration planning, execution, validation. Evergreen architecture means controllers upgrade in place and capacity expands without data migration. Buy storage once, run it for 10 years or more. Customers realize TCO savings exceeding 30% by avoiding a single forklift upgrade.
  • The operational track record backs this up: over 30,000 non-disruptive controller upgrades delivered. 97% of Everpure arrays five years and older remain in active service. 99.9999% measured availability, including planned and unplanned downtime.
  • Subscription models align cost with consumption. Evergreen//One™ provides storage-as-a-service with guaranteed SLAs for performance and availability. Pay for what you use. Scale on demand. Predictable monthly costs instead of capital spikes.
  • Consolidation reduces Oracle licensing costs. Higher storage performance enables database consolidation onto fewer hosts. Fewer hosts means fewer Oracle processor licenses. The storage investment can offset licensing costs.
  • Flat renewal rates enable planning. Everpure keeps subscription renewal rates flat. No surprise price increases. Multi-year planning that actually holds.

Third-party validation tells the same story. Everpure is a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Enterprise Storage Platforms (2025), positioned highest in execution and furthest in vision for the twelfth consecutive year. Gartner Peer Insights: 4.9 out of 5 rating with 98% willing to recommend. Net Promoter Score of 84, in the top 1% of B2B companies globally.

Getting Ready

Oracle AI Database 26ai is here. The upgrade itself is well-understood; Oracle’s AutoUpgrade tool handles most of the mechanics. The real question is what surrounds the upgrade: the testing, the validation, the cutover, and the years of operations that follow.

Every storage platform can run Oracle. The differentiation is the tax you pay along the way.

With traditional storage, that tax compounds. You learn one platform for primary, another for backup, maybe a third for object storage. You plan forklift migrations every few years. You tune and retune as workloads change. You build institutional knowledge that becomes technical debt when the platform is replaced. Each project pays the tax. Each year, the tax grows.

With Everpure, the tax is eliminated. One platform for primary, backup, and object storage. One operational model across your estate. One lifecycle that improves without replacement. The team that deploys Everpure for Oracle AI Database 26ai will still be running Everpure, on better hardware with better software, when the next major Oracle release arrives.