Oracle Adds Features To ZFS NAS Appliance

Oracle on 23 April released several new products involving the data centre equipment and application sides of its business.

In hardware, Orace updated to the third generation its Sun-developed ZFS Storage 7420 network attached storage (NAS) appliance. In software, the company upgraded its JD Edwards’ Enterprise One application for midrange enterprises with some industry-specific improvements.

Support for more virtual machines

The 7420 NAS system for data centres now has options that include a two-node, high-availability controller with up to 2TB of memory, up to 11TB of flash-based read/write cache, and 80 processing cores, allowing the system to handle more concurrent enterprise applications and support more virtual machines.

Sun ZFS storage appliances also offer larger 3TB, capacity-optimized SAS-2 hard disk drives within its fully automated Hybrid Storage Pool environment. These new drives complement legacy 15,000-RPM SAS-2 drives and enable the 7420 appliance to scale to more than 1.7 PB in total capacity, if needed.

And more and more storage administrators are discovering that they are looking at petabyte and multi-petabyte requirements for the future, due to ever-increasing size of data loads in general.

The ZFS storage appliances are the only NAS products engineered directly to Oracle’s software stack, from Oracle Applications to Oracle Database and Oracle VM, as well as the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4.

On the software side, the JD Edwards suite of ERA and CRM applications has been given a makeover to v.9.1. New functionalities, according to Oracle, include:

• For manufacturing enterprises: A project enhancement that provides visibility and demand tracking throughout the manufacturing process, allowing users to review all related supply orders impacting an end customer order to help ensure the project stays on track.
• Life sciences: Electronic batch record and device history record enhancement, which provides life science organisations with support for FDA-validated manufacturing processes by providing an audit trail over incident capture and resolution.
• New industry-specific business processes and capabilities for organisations in the food and beverage, agribusiness, real estate and professional services industries that support compliance requirements and enhance business productivity.
• Support for Global Locator Number (GLN), which helps organisations in consumer goods and other industries facilitate legislative compliance to seamlessly manage regulations.
• Country of origin tracking at the individual lot and serial number level that enables streamlined reporting by supporting import and export documentation requirements.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 also supports upgrades from Xe and higher releases of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, as well as migrations from Oracle’s JD Edwards World A7.3 or higher.

The new products are available now, Oracle said. The company made the announcements at its Collaborate users conference in Las Vegas.

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