Oracle Beefs Up Sun Storage

A day after introducing a major rebuild of its data center networking equipment and its Intel-based servers, Oracle yesterday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 product line.

This makes Oracle the first all-purpose data centre systems vendor to include built-in, at-the-gateway data deduplication and DTrace storage analytics in its storage arrays.

The powerful new cluster-type systems also feature inline data compression, 4Gbit/sec and 8Gbit/sec Fibre Channel protocol support, multiple storage pools, and new 1TB and 2TB SAS disk drives.

Maximum capacity supported by one cluster of these machines tops out at a whopping 576TB, Oracle said.

Picking up on pooling trend

Storage pooling is trending up in the industry (Sepaton announced this feature on 28 June). Pooling is an approach to storage virtualisation that assigns specific areas of the storage system to be dedicated to specific data flows, in order to enable more efficient multi-tenant service deployments.

Virtualised storage systems break files into chunks of data that are dispersed into numerous data centre or storage locations, and reassemble them on demand. Keeping data file chunks closer together in pools theoretically provides faster reassembly of file chunks.

Data deduplication – especially at the gateway – can reduce storage requirements by as much as 50 to 80 percent, depending on data type. The addition of compression provides a multiplicative effect on space savings. The deduplication and compression functions on Sun Storage 7000 systems operate in real-time and require no separate post-processing tasks, Oracle said.

Thanks to its January acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle became the first storage vendor to bring the company’s industry-respected DTrace Analytics for Fibre Channel SANs to the enterprise market.

DTrace is a dynamic tracing facility built into Solaris that helps developers look at, use and write applications for and manage general-purpose operating systems. DTrace is able to deliver sets of real-time telemetry data that support business processes.

DTrace analytics – deployable only with Fibre Channel connectivity – enable IT managers to quickly locate and manage storage area network (SAN) workload hot spots and bottlenecks, understand how configuration and application changes affect the storage system, and provision NAND flash storage capabilities without guesswork, Oracle said.

New 1TB and 2TB SAS drives – offered by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung – double the total capacity over previous systems, Oracle said.

As might be expected, the Sun Storage 7000 System Product Line is supported with Oracle’s Solaris or Enterprise Linux operating system and Oracle’s 11g Database, Fusion Middleware, and a bevy of applications.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control, for example, provides a combined Oracle Database-to-Sun Storage 7000 control view.