Enhancements of Oracle Sun Storage 7000

Enhancing its industry unified storage portfolio, Oracle Corp. announced upgrades to the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line.

The enhancements include built-in inline data deduplication that can be combined with inline data compression, 4 and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel protocol support, multiple storage pools, and new 1 and 2 TB SAS disk drives – doubling maximum system capacity to 576TB. These features help customers dramatically reduce the costs of storing, consolidating and managing data with increased storage efficiency, expand the use of the Sun Storage 7000 System product line into Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs), and improve overall capacity and availability.

Oracle is the first storage vendor to bring the power of advanced DTrace Analytics to Fibre Channel SANs. Storage analytics enable storage administrators to quickly locate and manage SAN workload hot spots and bottlenecks, understand how configuration and application changes affect the storage system, and provision Flash storage capabilities without guesswork.

As part of Oracle’s commitment to delivering complete, open and integrated systems, the Sun Storage 7000 System Product Line is engineered and supported with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database, Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Sun System software products, as well as third party products. For example, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control provides an integrated Oracle Database to Sun Storage 7000 view, enabling simple diagnosis of application delivery problems and storage impact during application and database deployment.

New Features Reduce Costs,
Expand Use and Increase Capacity

• The Sun Storage 7000 System product line reduces rapidly growing storage costs while simplifying the way customers manage storage. Unlike competing products, Oracle’s Flash-accelerated Hybrid Storage Pools ensure that customers don’t have to trade performance for lower storage costs.
• The enhanced product line provides integrated deduplication and compression, delivering significant space and cost savings. Data deduplication can typically reduce storage requirements by 50 to 80 percent depending on data type while compression provides a multiplicative effect on space savings. Unlike competing products, the deduplication and compression on the Sun Storage 7000 System product line work in real-time, requiring no separate post-processing tasks.
• The support for multiple storage pools enables greater optimization of storage for dynamic environments with multiple applications and user environments, a key requirement for cloud computing.
• With the addition of Fibre Channel protocol support, customers can for the first time use the Sun Storage 7000 System product line’s advanced analytics, and Flash-accelerated performance in Fibre Channel SAN environments.
• The Sun Storage 7000 System product line has one of the widest coverage of file and block access protocols for a unified storage system. Fibre Channel connected Unified Storage is ideal for consolidated private clouds that need to serve a variety of application protocols, and is a cost-effective upgrade for existing bulk storage/consolidation environments that use Fibre Channel to connect.
• New 1 and 2 TB SAS drives double capacity over previous systems, use a faster disk interconnect to move data at up to 6Gbit/sec, and offer improvements for added high availability. Unlike other products with file systems limited to 16TB, the Sun Storage 7000 System product line simplifies storage deployment and management by enabling its maximum capacity of 576TB to be accessed as a single file system, or thousands of individual file systems and LUNs.
• The Sun Storage 7000 Systems are the latest addition to Oracle’s complete portfolio of cloud-ready software and hardware products, designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructure.

"We are committed to providing a complete, open and integrated storage portfolio that reduces costs and simplifies storage management without compromising on performance," said Mike Shapiro, vice president of Storage, Oracle. "Oracle’s Sun Storage products, and specifically the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage product line, deliver innovative technologies and breakthrough economics for modern datacenter requirements such as private clouds, storage consolidation, and data protection."

"With the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, we were able to consolidate eight separate storage systems from six vendors into a single, unified storage system with one vendor providing support, maintenance and meeting all our storage needs," said Elvis Cernjul, vice president, Information Technology, Signature Styles. "The Sun Storage 7000 System’s built-in deduplication and compression capabilities further reduced our storage costs while the system’s 3x faster performance and high availability features enable us to more quickly access data and provide better support for our customers."

"The virtualized datacenter requires storage infrastructures that support specific innovative capabilities in order to optimize efficiency and dexterity," said Roger Cox, Research Vice President, Gartner. "Our research confirms that disk arrays that support unified storage architectures provide the necessary dexterity to meet changing requirements while simplifying management, thereby improving total cost of ownership (TCO). Functions such as thin provisioning coupled with integrated data deduplication and compression optimize storage utilization, reducing acquisition costs, as well as significantly reducing power, cooling and space consumption."