Oracle Targets Large Backups With New ZFS Appliance

Chris Preimesberger,

Oracle’s new ZFS Backup Appliance can back up full workloads at speeds up to 20TB per hour

Oracle continues to churn out product launches at the moment, after it launched a new Zettabyte File System (ZFS) Backup Appliance.

This appliance integrates with its other engineered-together systems, including the Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server and its SPARC SuperCluster rack servers.

A week ago, Oracle updated its super-fast ZFS network-attached storage system along with its main JD Edwards business services application – the latter of which is only redone once every few years. On 9 April, the company added new analytics capabilities for its StorageTek tape systems.

Sun Inheritance

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems as part of the Solaris operating system. ZFS was announced in September 2004, and source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development in October 2005. ZFS is the file system that powers all of Oracle’s data centre hardware; Oracle acquired Sun in January 2010 to inherit ZFS and all its features.

If the ZFS Backup Appliance were a motor vehicle, it would be breaking speed records. Oracle said its ZFS Backup Appliance packs the throughput to back up full workloads at speeds up to 20 terabytes per hour and up to 9.4TB per hour for full restore – way above most other systems’ published benchmarks.

The appliance’s fast I/O movement is based on backups of unique data and does not require additional host-side software or CPU resources, Oracle said.

Self-Healing

The appliance also features predictive self-healing analytics and a fault-management architecture that automatically detects and diagnoses underlying problems, Oracle said. End-to-end data check-summing also automatically checks and repairs corrupted data down to the bit level.

Because it works natively with Oracle Recovery Manager, using a direct connection via TCP/IP over InfiniBand, the ZFS Backup Appliance eliminates the need for additional servers and expensive third-party backup software, Oracle said.

The ZFS Backup Appliance is available in two configurations: high performance and high capacity, and it comes pre-racked and cabled.