Oracle Cloud Storage File System Automates Data Management

Oracle on 7 February introduced a new storage file system for applications running in a private cloud, called – appropriately enough – Oracle Cloud File System.

The new file system automates much of a system’s storage data management capabilities and institutes storage pooling across files, middleware and applications in a cloud. The idea is to extend cloud characteristics to existing storage by enabling more effective storage pooling through a network-accessible elastic storage cloud.

Bringing new life to older systems

When optimised, Oracle Cloud File System is designed to give new life to older or siloed storage systems, making their contents more easily accessible to other parts of the enterprise.

Pooling is an approach to storage virtualisation that delineates specific areas of the storage system to be dedicated to specific data flows, in order to enable more efficient multitenant 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 provides faster reassembly of file chunks.

Oracle combined its Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System and Oracle Automatic Storage Management Dynamic Volume Manager to comprise the cloud file system.

“What it does is leverage a lot of the cloudlike features that we have built over the last couple of releases,” Bob Thome, Oracle Group Product Manager in Distributed Databases, told eWEEK.

“This file system and the storage pools take the data and distribute it all across the disks and LUNs [logical unit numbers] that are available to it. It stripes everything for you and assures you that there aren’t going to be any bottlenecks.”

Features

File system features, according to Thome, include:

• Providing shared pooled storage with unified namespace for applications, operational files, and user files;
• Accessing storage either directly over a storage network or over traditional networks;
• Rapidly growing, shrinking, and migrating storage pools while applications are online;
• Snapshots and replication of files and file systems for backups and disaster protection;
• Data access security and encryption to protect from security threats;
• Easy aggregate management operations via file tags.

The Oracle Cloud File System is available now and is priced at $5,000 (£3,096) per processor. However, it is available free of charge for storing Oracle software binaries, metadata and diagnostic files.