1

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

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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

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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

16

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

19

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)