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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
The total volume of data being processed and stored by
businesses is rising exponentially. IDC has estimated
that the size of the “digital universe” will increase 29
fold between 2010 and 2020. Data storage technology
has sustained a steady increase in capacity, along with
a steady decline in the cost per unit to store information.
Unfortunately, the amount of storage capacity is not
growing as fast as the data, necessitating greater intel-
ligence in the storage infrastructure.
Oracle has proven itself ready to confront these
challenges. Its business-ready storage systems are
designed to maximize the performance and efficiency of
its industry-leading applications and database solutions,
and efficiently run mixed-application environments.
Getting Smarter
Oracle’s business-ready storage systems integrate
innovative hardware architectures, automated storage
tiering, and simplified storage management software
into an intelligent infrastructure that provides several
key capabilities.
• Comprehensive data management that extends
from application to archive
• Application-aware storage to optimize storage
efficiency and application performance in Oracle
environments
• Scalable capacity and performance to stay ahead
of growing data demands
Storage technology is more than just the foundation of the
technology stack. It’s an essential part of the hardware and
software ecosystem, enabling a framework for improved
performance, security, management, and efficiency.
Chapter 1
Strategy
IDC Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC, May 2010
[Read the Report]
“For the impressive group of committed Oracle software users, Oracle appears to have a product set and a plan to make storage relevant.”
—Mark Peters, Enterprise Strategy Group
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Operating Principles of Oracle’s Business-Ready Storage Environment
• Jointly optimize enterprise software and storage
to run faster and more efficiently together
• Align the value of each type of data with the most
efficient and cost-effective storage infrastructure
• Simplify the purchase, deployment, and manage-
ment of storage solutions
Chapter 1 (continued)
Strategy
4
Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Oracle solutions include servers, storage, networking
technology, and software that are integrated to work
together. These advanced technology environments
simplify deployment and reduce the need to purchase
additional standalone products and services. Oracle
increases both storage efficiencies and the efficiency of
storage administrators with tight integration between
the application, data set, and the storage environment.
For example, the Oracle VM Storage Connect framework
provides an application programming interface that
makes it easy to manage and provision storage in an
Oracle VM environment. Integrating virtualized server
and storage management operations into a single GUI-
based tool makes it easy for storage administrators to
directly configure and manage the storage attached to
their Oracle VM server pools.
For transaction-based workloads, Oracle Database blocks
are normally loaded into a dedicated shared area in
main memory called the system global area (SGA).
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 utilizes its Smart Flash
Cache feature to increase the effective size of Oracle
Database’s buffer cache without adding more main
memory to the system.
Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager enables
administrators to monitor and manage these storage
environments from a single console. For example, the
Pillar Axiom plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager
allows administrators to monitor one or more instances
of Pillar Axiom systems and the applications that use
their storage from within Oracle Enterprise Manager’s
Web-based console.
Chapter 2
Integration
“Oracle’s Sun offerings presented a unified, efficient, large-scale storage system that was flexible enough to grow with our rapidly evolving data processing workload.”
—Robert Lovery, Chief Information Officer, Australia Bureau of Meteorology
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Another example of integration is Oracle’s Hybrid
Columnar Compression technology, a new method for
organizing data within a database block. Originally
designed for Oracle Exadata Storage Server and now
integrated into Pillar Axiom and Sun ZFS Storage
Appliance, Hybrid Columnar Compression dramatically
improves the efficiency of Oracle Database applications
by enabling the compression benefits of columnar
storage while avoiding the performance shortfalls of a
pure columnar format.
Integration is pervasive across Oracle’s storage port-
folio as well. Since most enterprises require database
I/O, NAS file I/O, SAN block I/O storage, and tape-based
backup and archiving capabilities, Oracle offers all four
types of storage.
Chapter 2 (continued)
Integration
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Oracle customers enjoy superior performance across
the entire Oracle storage product line, whether they
are operating Oracle environments or running multi-
vendor application workloads. Each storage device in
the Oracle portfolio has been architected to match the
type of storage to the needs of the application through-
out the information lifecycle.
For example, Sun ZFS Appliance hybrid storage pools
(HSPs) automatically migrate data between DRAM,
Flash, and disk to continuously optimize storage perfor-
mance and efficiency while also simplifying manage-
ment. Compared1 to a NetApp FAS 3270A filer2, the
Sun ZFS Storage 7420 appliance3 delivers twice the
database I/Os per second (IOPS) as measured by the
SPC-1 benchmark in a SAN environment and does so at
less than one half the cost per IOPS.
For SAN environments, Oracle offers unique quality
of service (QoS) guarantees with its Pillar Axiom line.
These products implement automated, priority-based
queuing. Users can set priorities for specific applica-
1. Results as of October 1, 2011. Source: Storage Performance Council NetApp 68,035 SPC -1 IOPs and Sun ZFS 137,066 SPC-1 IOPs NetApp $7.49/SPC-1 IOP and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance $2.99/SPC-1 IOP
2. NetApp FAS 3270A:http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_re-sults_spc1#ae00004
3. Oracle Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance:http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00108
tions, and critical tasks gain priority access to the storage
device. This approach is in stark comparison with tradi-
tional SAN storage solutions, which employ a “first in,
first out” approach to prioritization, so background tasks
and business-critical applications are treated the same.
Oracle’s StorageTek tape solutions employ industry-
leading performance innovations at the library and
drive levels. For example, the robotics in the StorageTek
SL8500 and StorageTek SL3000 are path-optimized,
greatly reducing the amount of time required to gain
access to a tape drive. In addition, StorageTek’s file sync
accelerator and tape application accelerator reduce starts
and stops, improving drive performance and reducing
wear on the tape drive and media.
Chapter 3
Performance
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 3 (continued)
Performance
Storage hardware and database software come together
in Oracle Exadata Storage Servers to dramatically
accelerate database-processing activities in Oracle
SPARC SuperClusters and Oracle Exadata Database
Machines. Oracle Exadata’s Smart Flash Cache re-
places mechanical disk operations with electronic Flash
memory that far exceeds the limits of standard disk drive
technology. With 5.3 TB of Flash storage in a single rack,
Oracle Exadata Database Machine can perform up to 1.5
million database I/O operations per second.
Many of today’s enterprise applications require a high
volume of I/O throughput to keep users productive, a
costly undertaking using traditional storage architec-
tures. Oracle has solved this problem with Sun
“Imaging data will be stored on the StorageTek systems, as tape offers good streaming throughput for reads that enable data to be returned at speeds that approach hard disk performance.”
—Toby O’Brien, Queensland Brian Institute
Storage F5100 Flash Array, the world’s fastest and most
power-efficient Flash array for accelerating databases
and I/O-intensive applications. Sun Storage F5100
Flash Array supports more than 1 million IOPS in 1 rack
unit of space—the equivalent to 3,000 disk drives in I/O
performance.
[Read the Case Study]
“With Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, we’ve created a highly available and scalable storage environment for our growing content-on-demand service.”
—Christine McKinlay, Rogers Communications Inc.
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
There are many aspects to storage efficiency, including
reducing the total amount of storage needed, maximiz-
ing the utilization of current storage, and using the right
storage to minimize cost and energy. Oracle addresses all
these efficiency requirements and more with its portfolio
of optimized storage systems and solutions.
• Hybrid Columnar Compression enables customers
with existing Oracle Databases for OLTP, data ware-
housing, or mixed workloads to achieve up to 90
percent reductions in storage footprints for in-data-
base archives. Customers can significantly increase
performance by deploying Oracle Exadata Database
Machines and Oracle SPARC SuperClusters, or by
replacing existing EMC and NetApp storage with
Oracle storage solutions that support Hybrid
Columnar Compression.
• Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is the only NAS
storage solution that combines inline dedupli-
cation and compression for primary storage to
increase storage efficiency and reduce the amount
of storage needed by up to 90 percent.
• Pillar Axiom systems maximize efficiency by
prioritizing I/O activities with its “application-
aware” quality of service (QoS) capability. Buying
extra storage resources can eliminate I/O conten-
tion between applications, but in today’s cost-
conscious business environment, this simply
doesn’t make sense.
• Oracle’s StorageTek tape product line offers the
industry’s largest-capacity enterprise tape drive
and the densest library solution. Native capacity
on the StorageTek T10000C tape drive is 25 per-
cent more capacity than any other enterprise-class
drive, meaning fewer media cartridges are needed
to store the same amount of data.
Chapter 4
Efficiency
“The StorageTek T10000C enables NERSC to free up to 80% of the tape cartridge slots in its existing libraries, enabling it to avoid add-ing more libraries, which would be costly.”
—Jason Hick, NERSC
[Read the Case Study]
“With [Sun storage], we can cost- effectively scale data storage on demand to meet the needs of customers. Also, the platform helps minimize power consumption and makes day-to-day management simple.”
—Peter Lerche, CEO, EasySpeedy
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
In addition to great efficiencies within individual
storage technologies, datacenters can further increase
efficiency by moving from a single tier of disk storage
to an Oracle tiered storage environment that automati-
cally moves data among Flash storage, “performance
disk,” “capacity disk,” and tape, as shown below.
“With a native capacity of 5 TB and a throughput of 240 MB/s, a single StorageTek T10000C drive can back up a 5 TB data set in less than six hours.”
—David Reine, Senior Analyst, Clipper Group
Moving from a single tier of Tier-1 storage, to one that uses Flash, Performance Disk, Capacity Disk and Tape results in
faster performance and a 75% savings in storage expenditures.
[Read the Report]
Chapter 4 (continued)
Efficiency
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
An important consideration in your overall storage
strategy is how effectively it keeps your company’s
data secure and protected. Oracle storage integrates
several features that accelerate backup, recovery and
secure long-term archive of your critical data.
Many organizations encrypt sensitive data to increase
security and guard against loss. Oracle introduced
application-level encryption via Oracle Key Manager
for Oracle Database applications as well as for data
stored on StorageTek tape. Designed to meet stringent
enterprise requirements, Oracle Key Manager makes it
easy to implement and scale storage-based encryption,
for both operational and archival needs.
Pillar Axiom Storage Domains provide unique security
capabilities in multitenancy environments for cloud
computing. Other systems create multitenancy by
slicing up a single common pool of storage, but Pillar
Axiom Storage Domains offer the option of physically
separating data into a series of distinct storage pools
on different devices. This unique approach increases
security and prioritizes I/O requests within each individ-
ual storage domain based on Pillar Axiom’s automated
QoS capabilities.
Chapter 5
Data Protection
“When we tested our fraud- prevention solution based on Sun servers and storage arrays, our transaction benchmarks went through the roof.”
—Christopher J. Uriarte, CTO, Merchant Services Division, Retail Decisions
“If you’re not going to access data for a period of time...let it sit at rest in a tape library, where you can get it at a minute’s notice, as opposed to keeping all that data spinning and burning resources.”
—Robert Dick, Novant Health
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Both Pillar Axiom and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
offer features that help reduce risk and keep your
data protected in storage environments, including
snapshots, clones and replication capabilities. In
addition, Sun ZFS Storage Appliances offer end-to-end
checksumming that constantly reads and checks data
to ensure that it’s correct, and predictive self-healing
capabilities for automatically diagnosing, isolating, and
recovering from faults.
Chapter 5 (continued)
Data Protection
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Oracle Enterprise Manager simplifies IT maintenance
by enabling system administrators to manage multiple
levels of the technology stack via one unified manage-
ment utility. It provides a cohesive interface for all
statistics, alerts, faults, analytics, and provisioning—
not only for the Oracle storage product line but also for
many other types of hardware and software, both from
Oracle and other technology vendors.
Oracle offers other sophisticated utilities for
monitoring and troubleshooting Oracle’s storage
products. Storage administrators who use DTrace
storage analytics on Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can
see exactly how database systems are behaving, down
to the virtual machine and virtual disk level. When
combined with the intuitive, browser-based appliance
management environment, Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
has been shown to reduce management costs by as
much as 36 percent over NetApp filers.
Chapter 6
Management
“Administration of a Sun ZFS Storage Appliance requires 36 percent less time than is required for managing a competing system from NetApp.”
—Edison Group, 2011
[Read the White Paper]
On Pillar Axiom, an intuitive, complete graphical user
interface for management enables provisioning and
re-provisioning data volumes and file systems without
requiring specialized storage knowledge. In addition,
the Pillar Axiom QoS manager will automatically con-
figure CPU resources, priority queues, and more to
deliver the appropriate level of application performance
based on business requirements.
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Oracle has a complete storage portfolio with best-of-
breed products for all types of storage needs. It includes
everything from extremely fast Flash-based products
and SAN storage arrays to high-capacity, low-cost NAS
systems; highly scalable tape automation solutions; and
integrated database machines. As data ages, it can be
automatically migrated from primary to archival disk,
and then to near-line tape, where it can still be directly
accessed when needed. With Oracle storage solutions,
you can maximize the utilization of your online assets
and save energy and operating expenses for older data
that doesn’t have to be stored in an “always on” disk-
based solution.
Chapter 7
Products
Database I/O—Oracle Exadata Storage Server
Oracle Exadata is a massively parallel, fault-tolerant,
highly secure platform of preintegrated processors, stor-
age devices, switches, and software components that
has been engineered as a cohesive unit. The solution is
built around an intelligent storage grid that contains 14
high-performance Oracle Exadata Storage Servers with
up to 336 TB of storage and 5.3 TB of PCI Flash per rack.
This turnkey database system, optimized for hosting
Oracle Database 11g, delivers exceptional performance
for both online transaction processing (OLTP) and data
warehouse applications. For example, when a one-rack
Exadata system was compared with a five-rack EMC
Symmetrix V-Max system, Exadata performed 10 times
as many database I/Os per second, boasted 4 times the
database bandwidth for high-performance disks, and
had nearly 100 times as much usable capacity in its
database cache.
Oracle Exadata Storage Servers also provide high-
performance database storage for SPARC SuperCluster,
which integrates high-performance, high-throughput
SPARC-based servers with InfiniBand networks and
storage—making it a universal platform for integrated
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 7 (continued)
Products
Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, and mixed-ven-
dor application workloads.
Comparison of Oracle Exadata (single rack) to EMC Symmetrix V-Max
(smallest maximum throughput configuration of 5 racks)
Sun ZFS Storage Appliance—Oracle’s Premier NAS Solution for File I/O
Sun ZFS Storage Appliances offer industry-leading price
and performance, and support the consolidation of
multiple file servers onto a single high-capacity, high-
performance storage appliance. Ideal for consolidating
storage in Oracle Database and application environ-
ments, these appliances are highly tuned for NFS and
common Internet file system (CIFS) performance. Sun
ZFS Storage Appliances include advanced data services
such as thin-provisioning, compression, deduplication
and replication. They have enhanced data integrity and
data protection features to reliably deliver critical data
when you need it, and they support multiple data
access protocols like iSCSI and FibreChannel so your
NAS solution can also be used to serve data in SAN
environments.
Sun ZFS Storage Appliances4 especially shine when
compared to NetApp filers5, offering twice the database
I/O operations per second as measured by the SPC-1
4. Oracle Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a001085. NetApp FAS 3270A: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_re-sults_spc1#ae000046. Results as of October 1, 2011. Source: Storage Performance Council NetApp 68,035 SPC -1 IOPs and Sun ZFS 137,066 SPC-1 IOPs NetApp $7.49/SPC-1 IOP and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance $2.99/SPC-1 IOP
15
Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 7 (continued)
Products
benchmark6 in a SAN environment, and does so at less
than half the price per operation. In Oracle Database
backup and restore environments, the Sun ZFS
Storage Appliance has demonstrated twice the backup
and restore performance of similar NetApp filers, deliv-
ering over 9 terabytes/hour of backup and 10 terabytes/
hour of restore performance using RMAN software and
an Oracle Exadata Database Machine. They also provide
up to eight times more CPU cores and bandwidth to
support parallel I/O requests, up to 32 times more
memory capacity for caching and virtual machine
support, and a much easier and more complete set of
management tools. Analysts at Edison Group spelled
this out in dollars and cents, reporting that when all
the administrator tasks are taken into account, Sun ZFS
Storage Appliance yields 36 percent savings over the
NetApp filers.
Pillar Axiom—Oracle’s Premier NAS Solution for Block I/O
Oracle’s Pillar Axiom storage system was designed to
manage and prioritize resources based on the busi-
ness value of any given application. Customers can
specify the desired QoS level for each application, and
use those policies to allocate storage system resources.
Pillar Axiom far exceeds EMC SAN solutions in this
Hear how Qualcomm, a world leader in mobile technologies, uses Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances to optimize storage performance and accelerate prod-uct development.
—Matthew Clark, Qualcomm
[Watch video]
respect, with inherent quality of service, four times as
many controllers, 60 percent faster drive-rebuild times,
and Oracle’s unique Hybrid Columnar Compression tech-
nology to improve storage efficiency and reduce costs.
Oracle StorageTek Tape - Superior Backup and Archive
As data sources keep growing and industry regulations
for archiving data get more stringent, companies are
migrating a great deal of data from hard disk to near-line
storage repositories such as a tape libraries. Tape solu-
tions offer the most cost-effective means to maintain
long-term copies of infrequently used data and to back-
up large data sources.
Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries, tape drives, tape
media, mainframe tape virtualization, and tape device
software are world-class solutions that are used in some
of today’s most demanding data environments.
“Oracle demonstrates its commitment to advancing tape technology with the introduction of its StorageTek T10000C tape drive.”—Robert Amatruda, IDC
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 7 (continued)
Products
• Best in class: Oracle has the only enterprise tape
and midrange tape libraries with 24/7 high-avail-
ability features. The StorageTek T10000C tape
drive is the world’s highest-capacity tape drive
and the first tape solution to offer an exabyte (1
million TB) of storage capacity in a single tape
library.
• Proven: Oracle has more than 40 years of experi-
ence in StorageTek tape solutions.
• Reliable: StorageTek tape enables the highest lev-
els of cost reduction, performance optimization,
data availability, and simplified management
available on the market.
“Magnetic tape not only survives, but thrives, providing the IT staff with the reliability, portability, and security that it needs to pre-serve and deliver enterprise.”
—David Reine, Senior Analyst, Clipper Group[Read the Report]
[Read the Report]
“Long-term data storage needs con-tinue to grow. The amount of digital archive capacity held on tape will grow from around 13 exabytes in 2010 to over 80 exabytes in 2015.7“
—Mark Peters, Enterprise Strategy Group
7. “Digital Archive Market Forecast, 2010-2015,” (ESG Research Report, July 2010).
17
Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Complete Support for Your Oracle Storage Solutions
Only Oracle provides hardware and software
engineered and supported together as an integrated
whole with a single point of service accountability.
Oracle Premier Support for systems gives you the
complete system support you need to proactively
manage your Oracle storage systems, and it provides
swift resolution when problems do arise, keeping your
business information available 24/7. Coverage includes
rapid-response hardware service, around-the-clock
access to expert technical support, powerful proactive
tools, and embedded system software updates.
With Oracle, you can expect the highest level of award-
winning, fully integrated system support the industry
has to offer.
Maximize the Performance of Your Oracle Investment
Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services provides
services to help maximize performance and achieve
higher availability of Oracle storage technologies.
Oracle provides the knowledge and support needed
during the installation, configuration, monitoring, and
ongoing support of your mission critical IT infrastruc-
ture. Sample service activities include:
Chapter 8
Integration and Development
• Storage installation and configuration, focused on
accelerating return on investment
• Storage optimization, including configuration and
performance reviews
• Advanced monitoring and resolution services
across the entire IT stack
• Advanced Support Engineers with unparalleled
support and operational experience
“Oracle Sun infrastructure and Oracle Premier Support ensures our critical research data and sys-tems are secure, always available, and easy to access.”
—Jake Carroll, Queensland Brain Institute
[Watch video]
“Working with Oracle has been phenomenal. The customer ser-vice is excellent.”
—Craig Jones, GLVAR
[Watch video]
18
Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 9
Resources
Videos Stay Connected
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 9 (continued)
Resources
Webcasts Case Studies Case StudiesCase Studies
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Staying Ahead of the Storage Explosion
Chapter 9 (continued)
Resources
Analyst Reports Web Sites
Copyright © 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
White Papers Analyst Reports (continued)
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