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Flashing Innovation

Oracle’s new innovation in Flash Storage System aimed to outperform even its closest competitor

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Anushri Mondal
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Amit Mehrotra head systems Oracle India

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Oracle’s new innovation in Flash Storage System is aimed to outperform even its closest competitor

According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, external storage market in Q3 2014 witnessed a double-digit, quarter-on-quarter growth globally, at $ 61.97 million (about `372 crore).

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Oracle India has recently launched the Oracle FS1 Series Flash Storage System. This latest offering from Oracle India transcends the limitations of existing all-flash storage arrays and scales to petabytes of all-flash capacity while delivering a multitude of innovations designed to take flash technology to new extremes.

Oracle has launched this new solution on the heels of the significant growth in the flash storage industry. Increase in content creation and consumption, expansion of mobile devices and enhanced connectivity are trends leading to an upswing in this industry. Adoption of flash storage systems has also snowballed due to the growing use of a wide gamut of consumer electronics.

India’s adopting Flash Storage

Systems

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Despite being expensive (though prices are rapidly coming down), flash technology is witnessing a wide-scale adoption in India. The presence of mainstream enterprise storage companies validates that flash market will see increased growth. The reason why this technology is fast catching up is because flash drives are basically faster accessing devices as compared to traditional fiber channel drives. Industry experts and reports suggest that by 2018 flash storage will become cheaper than high-end disks.Oracle provides the industry’s most complete and comprehensive portfolio of high performance, high reliability Flash cache and Flash storage solutions, from SSDs and PCle Flash cards to Hybrid/Flash Storage Arrays and Application Engineered Solutions.

Growth acceleration and

expectation

According to IDC, storage market is expected to surge ahead due to a combination of positive sentiments, stable government, advancements in technology and announcements in the budget towards smart cities and development projects that will indirectly drive demand for storage. Enterprise Flash storage technology promises a balanced solution. However, the full capability of Flash to economically raise service levels is yet to be realized. This is predominantly because of the unfamiliarity of datacenters with Flash technology and ongoing notions of increasing complexity and cost attached with it. Growth is expected in Telecom and Government verticals as a combination of refresh investments in business outcome-led technologies and capacity requirements will work together to drive storage investments in the near future.

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Oracle filling an existing gap with the invention of Oracle FS1 Series Flash Storage System

The new Oracle FS1 Series Flash storage system scales to petabytes of all-flash capacity while delivering a multitude of innovations designed to take flash technology to new extremes. Scaling to petabytes of flash capacity with a high-availability, scale-out architecture, the Oracle FS1 Series flash storage system is the most intelligent, high-performance flash storage array for Oracle environments.Oracle FS1 Series is designed to deliver sustained, predictable, deterministic performance by individual application, under the control of administrators or autonomously by the Oracle FS1 Series system.Unlike most competitors’ all flash-arrays, Oracle FS1 Series Flash storage system gives enterprises the option to exploit the economics of hard disk without affecting the predictable performance expected from an all-flash array.

There are two major application workload problems today that currently rely on unsustainable manual labor-intensive admin intervention. “The first problem is that VMs interfere with the performance of mission- critical VMs and applications regardless of which hypervisor are 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,” says Amit Malhotra, Head-Systems, Oracle India. Oracle being the worldwide leader in relational databases is familiar with these problems and we have put in a lot of effort to solve these for our customers through the FS1 series.

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Existing limitations on Flash Storage

Customers today are facing a triad of issues requiring higher performance from their storage systems like greater server and application virtualization, faster servers and scale-out applications and Latency-sensitive applications. Flash storage is seen as the solution to these issues because it delivers the desired higher performance. Given that only around 10% of data is hot, current all-flash storage offerings are expensive and excessive for most data. Integrating flash storage from small startups into enterprise IT environments is risky and requires additional operational cycles, and retrofitting flash into existing legacy storage is inherently inefficient. Oracle offers an intelligent alternative to flash waste and flash-retrofitted legacy storage with an innovative flash storage system that transcends the limitations of existing all-flash storage arrays.

Oracle FS1 Flash Storage System is an enterprise-grade SAN storage system built on an established foundation of five generations of hardware and software flash innovation. Oracle FS1 is specifically architected to maximize the power of flash and the economics of disk without impacting the predictable performance expected from an all-flash array. It leverages the most intelligent management framework in the industry to efficiently move data in fine-grained blocks across four tiers of storage media with different performance and cost metrics. “Oracle FS1 is co-engineered with Oracle servers, operating systems, applications, and databases to provide Oracle-unique functionality that deliver significant business value to customers,” adds Amit Malhotra, head, systems, Oracle India,

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EMC, HP and IBM are some of our key competitors in this space. Oracle is the only tech company to continue to invest in R&D – and this includes for hardware too. We spend nearly USD 5 billion in R&D every year. Only Oracle’s application engineered storage is co-engineered with Oracle software to accelerate applications, increase efficiency, and improve management. The attributes that distinguish FS1 from competing products are the delivery rate of Oracle FS1-2 building blocks that gives 8x higher IOPS and 9.7x higher throughout than EMC XtremIO X-Bricks at less than half the cost per TB(1). Oracle FS1-2 is 400x more efficient than HP 3PAR and EMC VNX2- moving data 640KB blocks, which dramatically saves valuable flash resources and optimizes performance for Oracle databases. Customers no longer have to waste flash where it does no good.

Where Oracle stands today

According to IDC, the Indian external storage market showed signs of recovery after three declining quarters. In the recently announced Oracle Q4 FY14 results, Oracle’s global revenues from hardware systems business was up by 2% to touch 1.5 billion USD.

Anushri Mondal

(anushrim@cybermedia.co.in)

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