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!

ORACLE – The Information Company

It has been nearly a month now that I attended the Oracle conference in Kista, Stockholm. Finally, I have defied time allowing myself to put into words the experience I underwent during my presence at Oracle. The conference was interesting and fruitful as it allowed me to gain knowledge about which line of action Oracle has adapted to promote their business and products in the future. Their philosophy is simple and revolves around three criteria to recruit new customers and maintaining existing customer relationships. Their approach is simplistic, yet profound and insightful. These criteria are competitiveness, efficiency and simplification with respect to other market actors. Elaborating a little more on each of these three attributes, I found out they are keen on laying the “Best” foundation in the form of competitiveness, "Minimization" of operating costs by providing efficient solutions and providing "Standardization" and consolidation via simplification. The company differentiates itself by using off-the-shelf functionality allowing custom development of differentiating functions, thereby allowing richer options to customers. Their product, the Application Server, focuses on achieving best practices using the existing Java framework. The Application Server was portrayed to be prone towards performance, reliability, scalability, flexibility and manageability. The promoters of the products referred to this as Clustering Integration Management. The product is invaluable for its acquirers as it supports uprising architectures such as cloud computing. People at Oracle think that it is critical to achieve compatibility of existing product with proposed future paradigms. Apparently, cloud computing is useful for a firm as it enables pooling of resources and their sharing as well. This enables more capabilities to its user-base which is complemented with automation. It is a fast deployment architecture that eventually leads to achieve Operational Efficiency and High Performance. This architecture does this by eliminating big programs like huge operating systems and bringing in smaller apps which is where the idea of Operational Efficiency belongs. I learned the mode the apps adopt to realize this. These apps are available in high quantity. Being relatively smaller in size, deployment becomes easier as application deployment time is zeroed down. Putting this altogether, cloud computing results even more beneficial as the cloud architecture can exist at different levels.

Coming back to the Oracle product, people at Oracle have developed the product in a way that complements existing capabilities that can be found in similar products. This feature is what they believe sets them apart as it allows leveraging and reusing existing tools. Not only this, it also exhibits an identical programming paradigm. The product has been tested for deployment at enterprise level for which a number of enterprise development strategies have been proposed. These strategies are fault tolerant and enable high speed data intensive computing, which, in turn, parallelizes tasks. This leads to both time-saving and cost-saving.

It seems Oracle has learned a lot more since they acquired Sun Microsystems. They have a clear vision as to how they will move forward with a clear strategy. Their post-Sun strategy is designated towards productivity with choice which allows its customer base to undertake more freedom. From a personal point of view, I believe companies that fall within the technological territory have started to envision futuristic methods and are keen on implementing them by closely interacting with their core customers. The technological territory is full of rivalry. With one eye placed into the future, it is likely firms are going to combine forces rather than going head-to-head to achieve excellence.