From Oracle, All-Flash FS1 Storage System

Oracle International Corporation expanded its flash storage portfolio with the announcement of an all-flash model of its FS1 Flash Storage System.

Available, it delivers flash performance, capacity scaling, and flash provisioning and is designed to handle concurrent mixed workloads, such as OLTP and high-speed backup, in enterprise SAN environments as well as in private or public clouds. It delivers up to 64 all-flash domains for secure data isolation in multitenant cloud environments, I/O prioritization based on business value, scales to nearly 1PB of raw flash capacity, and goes from pallet to power-on in less than 30 minutes.

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FS1 demonstrates I/O performance and low latency with minimal falloff. Tests performed for customers show sub-one millisecond latency when running simultaneous workloads across small to large block sizes with up to 8x faster IO/s and 9.7x faster write throughput than EMC XtremIO ⁽¹⁾. As a result, FS1 can reduce Oracle Database I/O wait times and effectively give customers back time for projects that can help drive a company’s top-line growth and bottom-line savings.

The FS1 is co-engineered with Oracle Database and applications and delivers net incremental business benefits to customers when deployed with company’s software, from  data compression to one-click application provisioning. It is able to take advantage of Hybrid Columnar Compression, available only to company’s storage, an advanced data reduction technology. Hybrid Columnar Compression typically delivers a 10:1 compression ratio, nearly twice the data reduction usually obtained with deduplication techniques, reducing storage capacity requirements and accelerating Oracle Database queries. While encrypted database data can’t be deduplicated, it can be compressed with Hybrid Columnar Compression, providing higher levels of security to customers and maintaining Oracle Database best practices.

FS1 features Flash Profiles, which provide pre-tuned and optimized provisioning profiles for database and enterprise applications to simplify and accelerate flash storage provisioning and application deployment. As all-flash scale up two-node system, FS1 can support hundreds of company’s databases – all in flash.

“High latency has impacted customers on shared storage platforms for years, slowing down OLTP response times and preventing mixed workloads from running at full speed. Customers are looking to flash to address these issues,” said Mike Workman, SVP, flash storage systems, Oracle America, Inc. “Oracle All Flash FS1 dramatically reduces I/O wait times typically seen in today’s highly virtualized, transaction-driven enterprises where low latency is critical to response time. This superior performance combined with unique features, such as Flash Domains and Flash Profiles, make the All Flash FS1 the platform for customers who want to accelerate their applications in SAN and secure cloud environments.“

“Oracle practitioners in our community expect the highest levels of data integrity and security coupled with predictable performance,” said David Vellante, chief research officer, Wikibon. “Products such as the All Flash FS1 are riding the flash price/performance curve and promise to deliver dramatically lower latency and consistent response times at an affordable price. This can reduce the effort required to deliver what are often among the most stringent service level requirements in IT.“

“With their introduction of the Oracle All Flash FS1, which was engineered from the ground up to maximize Oracle Database performance and scale, Oracle enters the ranks of what IDC defines as the ‘true All Flash Array (AFA) vendors’,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage, IDC. “AFAs feature unique designs that are specifically optimized for flash media, delivering more consistent performance across their entire throughput range than hybrid flash arrays, and making them the storage platform of choice for application environments that demand the highest levels of performance.“

⁽¹⁾ 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. XtremIO data from pages 10-13 of EMC XTREMIO PERFORMANCE REPORT: Test Methodology and Performance Results of EMC XtremIO Version 2.4 SP1, published September 2014.