Born to Run in the AI era: Unlocking the True Value of Oracle Data with Everpure

Oracle AI World 2026 is putting a clear spotlight on the data behind enterprise AI. Oracle is framing mission-critical data as an AI-powered advantage, with Oracle AI Database 26ai bringing vector search, RAG, agentic AI, analytics, and application development closer to the data. Similar to Bruce Springsteen’s iconic song, Oracle workloads still need to be born to run, but in the AI era that means more than raw speed. The infrastructure underneath them must keep data performant, protected, recoverable, and available with business growth.

That shift also reinforces the idea of data primacy. Applications, models, and infrastructure will continue to change, but the Oracle data and the requirements attached to it have to endure. Performance, protection, recovery, retention, placement, and access are not one-time storage settings. They are outcomes the business expects to remain true as the environment changes around them.

Oracle AI Database 26ai also changes the storage workload itself. HNSW vector indexes with full DML support can place vector read/write activity on the same arrays serving OLTP. Vector embeddings increase tablespace capacity without a corresponding increase in row count. True Cache creates sustained read-throughput demand on back-end storage, while RAG pipelines can introduce unpredictable query bursts alongside steady-state transactions. These demands compound over time, raising the risk of latency, capacity pressure, and longer backup windows if the infrastructure was sized for yesterday’s Oracle workload profile.

That is where my colleague Andrew Sillifant’s distinction between configuration correctness and outcome correctness becomes especially relevant. A database can have replication, backup schedules, QoS policies, and protection groups that are individually configured correctly, yet still drift away from the RPO, RTO, performance, availability, or protection outcome the business expects. As Oracle 26ai introduces a more dynamic mix of transactional and AI workloads, infrastructure has to do more than be configured correctly on Day 1. It has to keep delivering and proving those outcomes over time.

For Oracle teams, the practical question is therefore not just whether 26ai can enable AI, but whether the surrounding data infrastructure can absorb those new demands without destabilizing the business-critical estate already running on Oracle. That is the point where data primacy, operational assurance, and infrastructure modernization come together.

For organizations evaluating what those capabilities mean for their Oracle estate, the infrastructure conversation should start with a simple question: Can you put more of your Oracle data to work for AI without adding performance surprises, operational complexity, or another source of disruption? Here is what that requires.

Simplicity with Intelligent Automation and Policy-driven Operations

Legacy storage complexity still shows up as maintenance windows, ticket queues, manual validation, and fragmented operating models. Those operational burdens become harder to justify when Oracle storage teams are also being asked to support new AI capabilities. Everpure is designed to absorb more of that infrastructure work underneath the Oracle workload, with a consistent Purity operating environment and a unified platform approach that reduces the number of storage-specific decisions teams have to manage as estates grow and change.

Automation matters most when it preserves intent, not just when it accelerates a task. Policy-driven provisioning, protection, and scaling can help these teams express requirements once and apply them consistently, while APIs and infrastructure-as-code through REST, Terraform, and Ansible make those workflows repeatable. The goal is to reduce the gap between what the database requires and what the infrastructure is actually delivering.

Everpure Fusion extends this model with policy-based orchestration across storage resources. For Oracle environments, the opportunity is to move from configuring individual infrastructure objects toward encoding service requirements such as performance, protection, and recovery as policy, then applying them consistently as databases, volumes, and dependencies change.

Watch this video to see Everpure Pure Fusion workflow templates in action.

Performance Headroom for Mixed Oracle Workloads

Performance is still essential, but peak benchmarks are only part of the story. Oracle AI Database 26ai changes the I/O contract between database and storage by mixing vector and OLTP activity, adding capacity pressure from embeddings, introducing bursty RAG demand, and increasing sustained read throughput for features such as True Cache. The infrastructure challenge is to preserve a predictable performance envelope as that workload mix changes, so storage does not become the variable DBAs have to isolate, tune, or troubleshoot.

Everpure addresses these bottlenecks with DirectFlash® technology, delivering latency as low as 150µs and up to 45GB/s throughput for rapid transactions and maximizing CPU core utilization. Infrastructure teams can also achieve up to three times higher performance and efficiency per rack unit compared with other solutions on the market. In addition, Everpure can reduce the storage footprint for AI vector searches by up to 60%, helping organizations handle fast-growing data demands more efficiently.

Teams can also create instant, space-efficient copies of production data for development, testing, analytics, and AI experimentation without impacting production systems. Built-in quality-of-service policies help Everpure maintain consistent, predictable performance under mixed workload pressure, giving Oracle teams room to innovate without turning every new consumer into a separate infrastructure silo.

Watch this on-demand webinar to learn more about Everpure’s Oracle infrastructure assessments that can help analyze your Oracle for peak workload concurrency and other factors.

Modernizing Oracle Without Adding Another Maintenance Window

Oracle modernization already carries enough moving parts without making storage another disruptive project. The Everpure Evergreen® Architecture decouples storage maintenance from Oracle operations so controllers, software, capacity, and platform generations can evolve nondisruptively while production databases keep running. That matters during a 26ai transition because a database upgrade should not automatically create a second storage migration, maintenance window, or revalidation cycle.

Modernization without disruption still has to include protection and recovery. Everpure provides multiple data-protection layers that Oracle teams can map to different failure scenarios. Space-efficient snapshots can complement Oracle RMAN for rapid recovery and copy workflows. ActiveCluster™ provides synchronous replication for metro availability, while ActiveDR™ supports asynchronous disaster recovery across distances. SafeMode™ Snapshots add immutable recovery points for ransomware resilience. Encryption, snapshots, and replication are platform capabilities rather than separate premium protection tiers, helping teams preserve recovery intent without adding another stack of tools or licenses.

That operational model is especially relevant as Oracle expands across on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments. The underlying business requirement does not change around keeping the data available, recoverable, and protected through infrastructure change. Everpure backs this approach with a 99.9999% availability guarantee and zero planned downtime for eligible FlashArray environments, while FlashBlade® can provide the throughput needed to keep growing backup and restore workflows from becoming the next bottleneck.

Watch this on-demand webinar to learn how the data protection approaches complement each other to address every Oracle failure and watch this video on Everpure’s rapid recovery approach using FlashArray snapshots.

Unified Data Visibility and Control

The final piece is operational consolidation. Oracle estates increasingly span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Reiterating the broader data-primacy idea, infrastructure should evolve around the data, not force the data to move every time the infrastructure changes. Everpure brings these infrastructure services into a more consistent operating model, with a single intelligent control plane. The goal is to reduce tool sprawl and manual handoffs while keeping the requirements attached to Oracle data visible as the estate changes.

That operating model also supports the Evergreen Architecture which helps decouple infrastructure change from the Oracle lifecycle. Customers can always choose to consume storage any way they want, with flexible data storage subscriptions that continuously improve and are tailored to their business needs.