By Cat Yong
Data is expected to grow 50 times in the next few years, while the number of administrators is predicted to chart a measly 1.5 times growth in comparison. Oracle’s Storage Product Director in ASEAN, Leong Kam Hong rightly points out that there should be a better way to manage all of this data.
“Right now, storage is just a box and it is passive. What we are bringing to market is something called application engineered storage. This basically means that storage should be integrated with applications or be able to communicate with applications to understand its requirements,” Leong said.
For Oracle, having solutions in the whole stack from applications, middleware, database, operating system and virtual machine, all the way down to servers and storage, allows Oracle storage products to have a speed dial to Oracle’s database. That translates to Oracle storage being responsive to the needs of an organisation’s applications.
What Engineered means
One example of an engineered feature is the Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol or OISP. Available with the latest 12c database, it sends I/O metadata to the new Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 applianceto tell it how to configure itself. This saves database administrators or DBAs’ time spent on fine tuning the database, because now the storage will configure itself accordingly.
Leong admits, “Today, we are only 65 percent there. Our goal is to 100 percent automate this process.”
Even so with 65 percent automation, DBAs can reclaim back as much as a month of productivity as opposed to wasting 56 days which is the average time spent on configuration.
Another way to look at it is, businesses can do 3 times more with the same amount of people.
With an application-aware storage and database like Oracle’s, data can be compressed according to how often it is accessed. Leong explained, “This is done automatically between database and storage, and the right compression algorithm is applied according to frequency data is accessed.”
He was quick to point out, “This only works with Oracle storage. And the net outcome is that customers consume less storage and still get performance from their database.”
One other example of an engineered capability is HCC or Hybrid Columnar Compression, which Oracle is extremely proud of. It is claimed to be able to save up to 40 percent on storage with 10 to 50 times compression. This is possible because data is compressed according to parameters in columns, and not just rows, which is usually the case for current database and data warehousing compression technology.
Especially when applied to ‘cold’ data, or data that isn’t so frequently used, it enables faster and simpler backup and recovery, reduces load on networks and overall simplifies operations and reduces cost. How often data is accessed or whether it is ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ is identified by ADO or the advanced and dynamic database optimisation capability.
OISP, HCC and ADO are the 3 core engineered features of Oracle’s application engineered storage.
Finger in every pie
Leong said, “If you have an Oracle database, it makes sense to have Oracle storage to make use of all its functions.”
He also added that customers of Oracle applications should consider their storage, as no other vendor’s storage out there is engineered and tune to work optimally with applications, like theirs is.
Since being launched and shipped in September, the new application engineered storage, the ZS3 series of network attached storage (NAS), has been well-received.
The Oracle Sun ZFS storage is used to stand up Oracle’s own cloud, with over 100 petabytes of data in production at Oracle to support its on-demand enterprise cloud, its internal IT and product development infrastructure.
