Oracle FS1 Series Flash Array

Scaling to petabytes of flash capacity with a HA, scale-out architecture, the Oracle Corp.‘s FS1 Series flash storage system is an intelligent, high-performance flash storage array for Oracle environments.

The new system’s QoS Plus management software simultaneously optimizes performance, cost andusiness value using fine-grain autotiering and secure multi-tenancy for application and user data isolation – all in a single, scalable storage platform.

The flash array is designed to deliver sustained, predictable, deterministic performance by individual application, under the control of administrators or autonomously by the FS1 Series system.

Its building blocks deliver up to 8x higher IO/s and 9.7x higher throughput than EMC XtremIO X-Bricks at less than half the cost per terabyte(1).

Maximizing the power of flash along with the option of exploiting the economics of disk, the it is a storage system that dynamically autotiers data across four storage tiers using business priority and application workload characteristics to deliver the lowest cost per IOP and per terabyte.

FS1-2 is 400x more efficient than HP 3PAR and EMC VNX2 – moving data in 640KB blocks, which saves valuable flash resources and optimizes performance for Oracle databases. Customers no longer have to waste flash where it does no good.

It supports both flash and HDD while outperforming competitor all-flash arrays(2).

Co-engineered with Oracle Database and Oracle Applications, the new flash array optimizes data center performance and Oracle software investments with Oracle-specific features such as:

• Hybrid Columnar Compression compresses data by 10x to 50x
• Application Profiles accelerate deployment and streamline management with single-click provisioning and deployment of Oracle Database and Applications

FS1 Series provides OS and hypervisor support, including support for Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle VM, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Windows, and VMware.

It accelerates data center consolidation and cloud deployments with secure multitenancy using FS1 Storage Domains that combine lock-down security with performance predictability.

“With over 164,000 affiliated companies, Groupe AGRICA serves more than 1.45 million subscribers and clients with pension and insurance products. BC is critical to us,” said Julien Mousqueton, CTO, Groupe AGRICA. “We are extremely pleased with our experience with the new Oracle FS1 flash storage system and will be deploying it as the foundation of our virtualized, highly available private cloud infrastructure. FS1 will enable us to standardize on an intelligent storage platform that simplifies storage services and SLA management for our private cloud to support our company’s future growth.“
    
“Keolis is France’s largest private sector transport group. As such, we need a high performance and highly available storage infrastructure to support all of our booking and ticketing systems, communications, passenger information and video security systems in a heavily virtualized environment,” said Olivier Parcollet, information system architect, Keolis. “We are impressed with the Oracle FS1 flash storage system’s performance and ease of deployment with our current infrastructure. To protect our data, we plan to implement a three-way DR configuration based on FS1 as a highly scalable storage platform combined with the FS1 HA data-replication features.”

“The FS1 aggressively solves via automation two major application workload problems today that currently rely on unsustainable manual labor-intensive admin intervention, and that frankly need addressing,” said Marc Staimer, presiden, Dragon Slayer Consulting. “The first problem it solves is that of the VM noisy neighbor where unimportant VMs interfere with the performance of mission-critical VMs and applications regardless of which hypervisor is utilized. The second even more critical problem is being able to deliver the elasticity in performance and capacity at a sufficiently granular level, to service mission-critical databases and applications in real time. These problems are intimately familiar to Oracle being the worldwide leader in relational databases. Solving them is just common sense.”

“If your storage were smart and self-optimizing, using the right combo of intelligent caching, flash and disk – and could deliver QoS at a granular enough level – you’d be perfectly aligned. With the launch of the FS1, Oracle seems to have built just that,” said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder, Enterprise Strategy Group.

“The new Oracle FS1 is like no other array we’ve ever seen on the market,” said David Vellante, chief research officer, Wikibon.org. “Not only is the system engineered specifically for Oracle software, but also it’s uniquely optimized for both performance and cost, depending on the workload. With built-in orchestration, the array is designed to dramatically speed deployment and simplify ongoing tuning. In addition, secure multi-tenant domains together with extremely high levels of storage allocation granularity supports a unique business-led QoS. There’s a lot to the FS1 that will appeal to application heads, DBAs and storage pros alike.”

“The Oracle FS1 Series marks the emergence of a new class of application-engineered storage that eclipses SAN solutions from EMC, NetApp, HP, and IBM. It enables our customers to use business priorities to drive their IT investments instead of IT limiting their business potential,” said Mike Workman, SVP, Oracle storage. “The Oracle FS1 Series is designed from the ground up to optimize and automate the use of high-performance flash storage technologies to support the demanding and varied workloads in today’s dynamic data centers. When combined with Oracle Database technologies such as Hybrid Columnar Compression, Automatic Data Optimization, and Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle FS1 Series systems will enable our customers to achieve dramatic reductions in capital expenditures and greater operational efficiencies.“

(1) Oracle FS1-2 delivers 8x higher IO/s for 50% Read/50% Write IOs of 32KB, 215,000 for FS1-2 and 26,863 for XtremIO X-Brick, and 9.7x higher write throughput 5.4GB/s for FS1-2 and 554MB/s for XtremIO X-Brick. EMC pricing of $510,000 for a 20TB X-Brick from GSA price list.

(2) Based on Oracle test results and publicly available third party information.