Oracle has announced its latest-generation NAS storage system, the Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4. Co-engineered with Oracle Database 12c, the ZFS Storage ZS4-4 provides analytics for pluggable databases, doubles previous generation performance to enable faster time to actionable intelligence, and also provides high-level protection against security breaches with fine-grained encryption capabilities.
The OS 8.3 adds over 30 enhancements and three new innovations that expand Oracle’s leadership in NAS performance, efficiency, and application-engineered storage, said Oracle executive vice president John Fowler during a recent webcast.
New Capabilities for Oracle Database 12c
Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4—with the new Oracle ZFS Storage OS8.3—delivers new capabilities for Oracle Database 12c environments.
The new system provides pluggable database-level visibility into thousands of containers across the enterprise with analytics to simplify and accelerate storage performance tuning and troubleshooting in Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Multitenant environments.
According to Oracle, customers can identify database-related storage issues in 67% fewer steps with Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 due to the exclusive co-engineering with Oracle Database 12c, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance analytics and the new Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol 1.1.
Users can correlate application performance, database performance and storage performance. “We have plugged in our analytics into Oracle Enterprise Manager to allow you to have that comprehensive view,” said Fowler. “No other storage company has the ability to show you analytics all the way from the application, through the database’s storage device, or analytics on a multi-tenant database environment that allow you to look at pluggable and container databases, therefore giving you a tremendous leg up in consolidating and managing your data stores.”
Double the Performance of its Predecessor
The Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 enables greater amounts of data at in-memory speeds, doubling the performance of its predecessor with more than 30 GB/sec throughput and 50% more dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and CPU cores. “Our architecture is different than our competitors. We’re not just about Flash. We’re about DRAM,” said Fowler. “
The Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 is built on an in-memory, DRAM-based Hybrid Storage Pool architecture and multi-threaded symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) OS which takes advantage of all 120 cores in parallel and 3 TB DRAM per cluster. With up to 90% of system I/O delivered from memory, customers can significantly accelerate application performance. “Memory is much faster than Flash,” said Fowler.
Integrated Data Encryption
Another key enhancement to the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances is the integration with data encryption. The system offers Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit data-at-rest encryption at the project-, share- or LUN-level with the capability to combine encrypted and non-encrypted volumes in a system. Whether enterprise-wide or local, encryption key management gives customers high levels of protection against security breaches while managing compliance with regulatory requirements.
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances also support Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) and automatic data optimization with HCC for Oracle Database 12c. HCC enables data warehousing and archiving environments, among others, to compress by an average of 12x, while increasing database query performance by up to 5x, and reducing storage capacity costs by 40%.
Wide Adoption
According to Oracle, its NAS systems have been widely adopted by a majority of the Fortune 100 companies, 9 of the 10 top telecommunications companies, 5 of the 5 top semiconductor companies, and 4 of the 5 top U.S. banks. Oracle ZS storage systems are used by more than 4,000 customers with over 14,000 systems deployed, said Fowler.
According to Oracle, orders can be placed now for the ZS4-4, and the new OS8.3 for existing systems will be available before Dec 15.
More information is available about the Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4.