Oracle has added upgrades to the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line, including built-in inline data deduplication that can be combined with inline data compression, 4 and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel protocol support, multiple storage pools and new 1 and 2 TB SAS disk drives - doubling maximum system capacity to 576TB. The features are intended to help customers reduce the costs of storing, consolidating and managing data with increased storage efficiency, expand the use of the Sun Storage 7000 System product line into Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs), and improve overall capacity and availability.
The enhanced product line adds data deduplication to compression and thin provisioning to further improve "an already strong lineup of ways customers can reduce the managed storage capacity," Jason Schaffer, senior director of product management for Storage products at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Data deduplication can typically reduce storage requirements by 50% to 80% depending on data type while compression provides a multiplicative effect on space savings.
The support for multiple storage pools enables greater optimization of storage for dynamic environments with multiple applications and user environments, a key requirement for cloud computing. And, with the addition of Fibre Channel protocol support, customers can for the first time use the Sun Storage 7000 System product line's advanced analytics, and Flash-accelerated performance in Fibre Channel SAN environments. Fibre Channel connected Unified Storage benefits consolidated private clouds that need to serve a variety of application protocols, and is a cost-effective upgrade for existing bulk storage/consolidation environments that use Fibre Channel to connect. With the addition of Fibre Channel protocol support, customers can for the first time use the Sun Storage 7000 System product line's advanced analytics, and Flash-accelerated performance in Fibre Channel SAN environments.
New 1 and 2 TB SAS drives double capacity over previous systems, use a faster disk interconnect to move data at up to 6Gbit/sec, and offer improvements for added high availability. Unlike other products with file systems limited to 16TB, the Sun Storage 7000 System product line simplifies storage deployment and management by enabling its maximum capacity of 576TB to be accessed as a single file system, or thousands of individual file systems and LUNs.
The Sun Storage 7000 System Product Line is engineered and supported with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database, Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Sun System software products, as well as third-party products. "It is important to understand that a lot of customers have heterogeneous environments where they need to support VMware for example, and so have also integrated and shown use of this technology in serving both VMware and Oracle environments simultaneously," says Schaffer.
For more details about Oracle's Sun Storage portfolio, go here.