Oracle Finally in All-SSD Subsystem

Oracle is the 44th and last company entering into all-SSD system market, much later than some pioneers, essentially start-ups (Pure Storage entered in this market three years ago.)

It’s strange for Oracle to be so late as, for all-SSD systems, one of the most important – if not the
most important – application is to accelerate databases where Oracle is a huge actor, and furthermore, when you think that, trough its acquisition of Sun, it could design much earlier this kind of device with its long standing knowledge in storage subsystems (also with Pillar Data) and storage OS (NFS).

Enterprise customers of big databases are ready to invest a lot to gain milliseconds, even microseconds, to access their mission-critical data. We suspect here that other all SSD system makers, including Pure Storage and EMC (XtremIO), have already sold many of their products to Oracle’s database customers.

The new Oracle FS1 Series flash array supports SSDs and also HDDs to configure a hybrid configuration co-engineered with Oracle software but also aimed at Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange.

The sixth generation of Pillar Axiom storage subsystems – without any relation with Sun ZFS -, is a high-end SAN solution scaling to 912TB of flash, and up to 1.7PB, with 16 controllers and with the possibility to combine MLC or SLC SSDs, and high perlormance or high capacity disk drives, with automatized tiering. The 2U and 4U FS1-2 controllers can support 30 drive enclosures and multiple I/O ports for different infrastructure requirements, 16GbFC, 10GbE iSCSI and Ethernet. Each one can contain 400GB and 1.6TB 2.5-inch SSDs, 300GB and 900GB 10,000rpm 2.5-inch HDDs, and 4TB 7,200rpm 3.5-inch hard disk drives. The 2U model accepts twenty-four 2.5-inch drive bays and the 4U twenty-four 3.5-inch drive bays. Maximum performance announced is 2  million IO/s and 80GB/s transfer rate.

Among the most interesting specs of FS1-2:

• Granular auto-tiering at 640KB increments: to be up to 400x more efficient than HP 3Ppar and EMC VNX2 in optimizing application data location, according to Oracle, adding that it “outperforms EMC XtremIO by up to 9x.” It saves flash resources and optimizes performance for Oracle databases and customers no longer have to waste flash where it does no good.
• Supports Oracle Database Hybrid Columnar Compression: compressing data “by 10x to 50x” to reduce capacity and upfront costs “by 3x to 5x” and speeds queries “up to 5x.”
• Synchronous and asynchronous replication
• Inside-the-box software included: at no extra cost
• Oracle MaxMan: for the management of multiple FS1-2 and/or Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 6000 systems from a single console.
• Storage domain software: enabling multiple, virtual storage systems within a single flash storage system.

No price has been announced by Oracle as it’s mainly a rule for all SSD system manufacturers because their configurations are very expansive, easily in $100,000 range and sometimes surpassing $1,000,000. General availability: November 4, 2014.