From Dave Cahill
Oracle executives presented to the storage community on June 30th, 2011, following its acquisition of Pillar Data.
Oracle Storage Strategy
Mark Hurd
"Pillar acquisition a big part of what we are working on"
$50+ billion storage industry enterprises touch 80% of worlds digital data, amount of data on planet 2x's over next 4 years
>5b mobile phones today, 11b app downloads annually
year 2020 = 35,000 exabytes new digital data from 1,200 today
Architecturally, the world has evolved with app, data and storage are separate...but all of this content is going to require a tighter alignment, drives a paradigm shift to tighter integration to drive optimal performance tighten integration between data set and storage engineered for oracle software, best of breed for mixed environments streamline access from app to disk, dramatically less storage required, far easier to manage, unified security across Oracle stack believe they can make differentiators come alive and manifest themselves with products
think they can run apps 10x faster with 1/10th the storage size...leveraging oracle differentiators and aligning oracle technology together huge change in cost and complexity, running 10x faster...100x benefit from where you sit today
not true with every app but many examples of making this happen contention between apps and data going to get bigger, requires change in the market
Oracle Storage Portfolio
John Fowler, EVP, Systems storage portfolio
Exadata = database i/o
ZFS storage appliance = NAS file i/o
Axiom = SAN block i/o
Oracle StorageTek Tape = Tape
storage differentiators
past 10 years storage has been very generic infrastructure can do end to end optimization to get much better capabilities oracle apps auto-provision and tune oracle storage
understand app knowledge and how DB is layed out, can move compression tech into storage layer, tremendous compression factors, conventional storage doesn't have app understanding to make this happen
security...encryption keys autogenerated from app, DB, storage, can accelerate encryption into the storage, encrypted storage at nearly same performance
ExaData DB machine high performance servers, 5-8x faster network, tightly integrated storage cells 5.3TBs PCI flash per rack...integrated across storage nodes up to 300 TBs storage in a rack, managed at DB level
exadata better than EMC for DB i/o...execute DB queries in storage, DB compression in storage, DB aware flash cache, 10x DB compression factor, reengineered architecture between storage and DB. much more application aware approach
ZFS Storage Appliance
next gen NAS appliance, seamless flash
can mix flash and disk w/o mgmt overhead
efficient snap/clone for test and dev
>2000 deployments, >5000 systems
vs NetApp = advanced analytics, 4TB max flash cache, 1TB max memory cache,
>2500 max snaps/volumes, hybrid storage pools, direct connection to Oracle DB resources, Oracle DB columnar compression
StorageTek
no tech better for large scale protection and archive
>30k systems sold to >8000 customers
Pillar Data Systems
Axxiom Update, Phil Bullinger, SVP Disk Storage, Oracle (former Engenio)
product has very compelling product characteristics
architecture well suited to strategic direction, allows integration of app, DB and storage to drive performance and efficiency
customer value
improved app performance, fundamentally app aware, can align systems resources and data placement with app requirements
dynamic resource allocation model, continually tunes to workloads deterministic...can deliver specific level of QoS, specific level of i/o based on business priority
can linearly scale capacity and performance
efficiency from SAN consolidation
large home improvement retailer in Canada...have >240 apps running on Pillar, >1PB of storage, each app has unique QoS associated with it multiple workloads can run on same system
product scales as components added
simplified management, all customers say easisest product to deploy, out of box and up and running in <2 hours with no PS, intuitive UI
architecture
multiple apps layer on top of architecture
system resources prioritized by app type
one customer split resources across OLTP apps, exchange apps, archive apps and digital surveillance
balances CPU priority, cache allocation, data placement
manages pools of storage as single entity
architecture perfectly matches strategy of storage business...deliver storage products that run oracle apps better
"best of breed product", hetergenous app support
the perfect platform for the SAN side of Oracle business
>1500 systems to 600 customers
"absolute intentions are to scale this business"
Axxiom vs. EMC comparison (CX4-960)
QoS advantage
max controllers 8 vs EMC 2...product can scale on performance or capacity
distributed RAID architecture drive rebuild performance, industry leading drive rebuild up to 60% faster
guaranteed utilization 80%, 2x industry average
app profiles included
oracle DB columnar compression
integrating with Pillar and ZFS for unique efficiency and performance
Key takeaways
Oracle sw runs faster and more efficiency on oracle storage, story going to get a lot better from here
oracle now has complete storage portfolio with Pillar
oracle will definitely accelerate and scale storage business by leveraging global resource, reach and IP
Q&A
On positioning versus EMC many customers have all their data in pure oracle environments, in this case exadata is a fantastic solution
have queries they can run 60-70x faster exadata is combo server, storage and networking but eliminates all services to hook all this together
not only about tech benefits but high level enterprise fit
Unified storage w/ZFS?
each of these technologies are better at one or the other, will differentiate the technology by what they are best at
Axxiom inherently better for OLTP environments, ZFS better for NFS/CIFS
Cloud play?
multi-tenacy and security important in cloud, all storage products understand this today
all products today operate at extremely high performance for cloud
tools have to understand apps and end to end view, requires superior operational capability
the cloud is a delivery vehicle of choice for many companies everything we do will be cloud related
will be able to mix and match oracle apps by how you like to use them, from same code base
everything we think about we do in the context of customer choice
Engenio 6000 line?
have 20k customers of this product, will continue to sell and support for foreseeable future
"we are serious about storage, full famility capabilities now, have a complete familiy of products"...this will extend into our complete view of the hardware market
Bottom line Wikibon perspective. Oracle's strategy is to engineer hardware and software solutions together, essentially driving costs down (oracle's costs) and leveraging its advantage as a software/database player. Optimizing for performance and efficiency and placing storage function at the proper point in the stack is advantageous and a clear competitive advantage. Oracle is the mother-of-all-lock-ins for users and the appliance approach limits the fungibility of the storage asset across the application portfolio - meaning customers will pay more. Oracle will be able to charge a premium because of its value proposition. Oracle is rapidly becoming a force in the hardware market by virtue of its database and software dominance.