SCIENCE

Oracle has introduced its next-generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line. This line of storage appliances sets a new benchmark in unified storage, with 50 percent more performance, two times more storage capacity, nearly three times more processing power, and storage analytics utility with DTrace Analytics.

The ZFS Storage Appliance product line includes management software and a hybrid storage pool architecture that has been integrated with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, to provide optimal business system performance. The products deliver high throughput, flexibility and ease of use demanded by organizations using storage for cloud computing, virtualization, storage consolidation and data protection.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line provides three new tightly integrated data protection solutions for Oracle Applications: Oracle RMAN backup optimizes backup with Sun ZFS Storage Appliances, Oracle Database Cloning increases database performance by integrating Sun ZFS Storage Appliances with Oracle Data Guard, and Oracle Fusion Middleware simplifies disaster recovery with ZFS Storage Appliances. These offerings extend Oracle's list of over 70 qualified software solutions with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line combines a Flash Hybrid Storage Pool architecture for file and block workloads with DTrace Analytics for storage and web-based management, enabling organizations to deploy new applications faster and lower administrative costs by up to 50 percent.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line delivers data protection, storage efficiency costs and higher performance and scalability. For example, the Sun ZFS Storage 7720 Storage Appliance provides 1.6 times better storage density than other unified storage solutions.

The new Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line ranges from entry-level configurations starting at 12 TB to high-end systems that support more than 1 PB of storage capacity. All systems feature high-density disks and flash acceleration.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance line is ideal for consolidating Oracle Applications. It is a unified storage appliances that can simultaneously run all major block and file protocols (Infiniband, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS), includes a complete suite of data services (triple-parity RAID, deduplication and compression), and can scale to 50 percent more server connections than the competition. The line has been integrated with Oracle's business software. Studies have shown that it reduces management complexity by 30 percent and improves storage administrator productivity by 35 percent when compared to NetApp solutions.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line combines in-line deduplication and compression built into the unified storage controller to increase storage efficiency for primary storage by up to 90 percent. It also offers end-to-end data and metadata checksums, self-healing data technology and triple-parity RAID, making ZFS Storage Appliances ideal for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle's Siebel CRM, and the Oracle E-Business Suite environments. In addition, the ZFS Storage Appliance product line includes unlimited snapshots and clones, making it ideal for high performance backup, data protection and disaster recovery deployments for Oracle Applications and Oracle Software.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance line lowers capital expenditure and operating expenditure by one-third with Oracle's flash hybrid storage pool technology, industry leading storage density, reduced power utilization and improved storage administrator productivity compared to competitive offerings. Every data protocol and data service, including file and block protocols, deduplication, compression, replication and clustering is included for the single price of the system.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line is ideal platform for storage consolidation and refresh, with a 50 percent increase in throughput and support for multiple concurrent data services. The storage controllers with large amounts of DRAM and flash cache enable Sun ZFS Storage Appliances to support a mix of file and block level access for Windows and Unix data, allowing customers to achieve 3:1 or greater reduction in the number of storage systems while increasing performance and lowering costs.

The ZFS Storage Appliance line is the latest addition to Oracle's complete portfolio of cloud-ready software and hardware products, designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructure. In cloud environments, they enable customers to deploy applications faster and at a lower cost.

"Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances have gained strong industry recognition with an innovative architecture that enables customers to cut their enterprise storage costs in half and speed application deployment," said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president, Server and Storage Systems. "The next-generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line delivers more than 2x the scale of the previous generation and increase integration with Oracle's business-critical applications."

"When the 7000 Series first hit the market, its massively impressive capabilities -- including auto-tiering, compression and deduplication, and advanced analytics -- might have seemed a little incredible in an easy-to-use and economical unified storage platform," said Mark Peters, senior analyst, the Enterprise Strategy Group. "But now that it is time-and-market-proven, and has added scale and performance with these latest upgrades, any excuses for not taking a look are getting pretty hard to come by."