Friday, October 29, 2010

Oracle Battling the Data Storage War

Tuesday, October 26, 2010: Conference at Oracle in Kista Science City, Stockholm, Sweden. Latest happenings at Oracle indicate that they are very much into producing solutions and services which hold great potential for companies that deal with lots and lots of data on an everyday basis. The service under promotion was subtitled “Business Ready Storage Solution – Software, Hardware Complete”. The product is fundamentally a B2B product which customers can leverage and cope with extreme quantities of data.

Guys at Oracle stressed that IT challenges are increasing which has a substantial impact on the demand for storage capacity. The era where customers were able to put all the data they had onto disk is over. We are residing in a new world where the rules of the game have changed. Data quantities have not only increased but it is apparent of diverse manners. Interestingly, 80% of the data we handle today is unstructured which signifies that reuse of existing data is shrinking. An incredible 80% of the data that is being handled is not usable. To support this fact, the data being used today becomes obsolete after 90 days. There is a strong need to archive data. A shortcoming emerges when we look at the costs that are involved in storage management. A colossal 30% of the entire costs that encompass IT infrastructure is employed for this purpose. Additionally, storage of this data consumes 40% of a data-center’s power.

"Data Storage Becoming a Big Concern", Oracle CEO

Though the evolutionary practices that have revolved around multi-tiered disk storage have attempted to address this shortcoming it did not seem enough to counter the turmoil. Oracle emphasized that it is critical that new storage models ought to be designed and the one that can cause a major breakthrough is the incremental usage of Flash Storage. Oracle’s vision is to provide business-ready solutions with a high degree of performance that function optimally, are efficient and scalable at a low cost. They have designed a product that secures data access on an on-demand basis, offers unlimited capacity and unparallel storage performance. Directed at B2B customers, as depicted earlier, it is a unique and simple management tool that integrates applications, systems and storage on a large scale. The philosophy behind this is simple. In designing such a product, they started off with a general purpose. Here, they develop a product and analyze where it falls short to address the needs of the customer. Supplementary innovation is carried out to achieve the desired product which is followed up by integrating previous works.

Going into a little bit more detail about the product, named “Oracle ZFS Storage” allows operations with 10 different protocols within a single box. The product offers diverse advance services which are already built-in. these services include clustering, replication, cloning, de-duplication, provisioning analytics, virus scanning and plenty more. ZFS Storage also offers choice of interconnect among Ethernet, fiber optics and Infiniband on a simultaneous basis. A feature that separates this product from the rest of data management tools is that it supports multiple simultaneous apps and workload analysis n production. The product provides a throughput of 8 GB/s as well. All in all, the product provides an extensive back-up system. Towards the finale, it was highlighted that the design of the product was aimed at supporting the buzzed architecture – Cloud Computing as well.

Oracle ZFS Storage Dilemma

A few days ago, I was posed a query whether or not the cloud is the new way of outsourcing. Clearly, the cloud offers a variety of advantages. It allows the centralization of data with merely no infrastructure at all. It cuts down costs massively and makes operations smoother. I insist it further takes care of the dilemma Oracle executives addressed during this conference - appearance of exponential data amounts. If the “Cloud” is not yet a new way of outsourcing, it is very much on its way to accomplish it!

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