9 years ago

A Quick Look at Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4: What you need to know about it (Part 2 of 2)

Share in:
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter/X
Email
Share in:
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance provides the performance and flexibility you need to meet current requirements and be ready for the cloud.
You can read the first part of this article here.

Oracle’s ZFS Storage line has always been known as a high-end system for NAS Storage. The Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 is no exception.

The fourth generation ZFS-based system gives you double the performance, double the processing power, and three terabytes of DRAM. It also supports pluggable database analytics and data encryption at rest.

Powered by OS8.3

The Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 is powered by OS8.3 operating system and enables customers to fully take advantage of the benefits of Oracle Database 12c environments, which allows a number of pluggable databases to run in a multi-tenant container database, mimicking the virtual machines running on a virtual server.

OS8.3 comes with the new analytics feature. This allows Oracle 12c users to check out and monitor what is happening to each of the pluggable databases, instead of seeing all the pluggable database as one instance. Meanwhile, storage and database administrators would be able to see at least 107 analytical views of each database instance to check whether they could do something to increase its performance or correct anything that might be wrong with their databases. This means that you no longer have to spend a long time tuning your Oracle Database for the best performance and storage.

A co-engineered system

What’s more, Oracle’s pluggable database analytics work on the company’s Intelligent Storage Protocol. The new protocol represents one of the most recent projects in the effort to co-engineer the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance and Oracle Database 12c.

On top of these, you also get automatic database optimization and hybrid columnar compression to help speed up performance and give you better efficiency.

In short, Oracle Database 12c works best with Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 storage system. You can now host thousands of database instances on one infrastructure stack without sacrificing performance!

According to David Floyer, who is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Wikibon, one of the functionalities that more users would be keen to see is how the ZS4-4 retrieves data. Floyer remarks that as a NAS box, the ZS4-4 is a fast one and is the fastest, or one of the fastest, boxes out there. In fact, Floyer thinks that the company’s claims that Oracle Database 12c runs faster on its ZFS storage appliances is true, even as NetApp and EMC are working very hard to ensure that they do not get lost in the mix.

More processing power

When it comes to processing power, the ZS4-4 has more than 120 processor cores, around 1.5 times more than the 80 processor cores we saw in ZS3-4, and can support up to 3 terabytes of DRAM, up from only 1.5 terabytes in ZS3-4. Using hybrid pool storage, the appliance would serve at least 85% of I/O out of the DRAM. In short, the appliance performs similarly to a DRAM system, and less like a flash system or the disk drive system.

The ZS4-4 makes use of SAS hard disk drives, as well as SLC flash for writes and MLC solid state drives for reads. The system can take up to 300 petabytes.

Because the ZS4-4 uses the OS8.3 operating system, you can now have a software based, 256 bit data at rest encryption that is in-system. This means that you can encrypt and secure your data at a logical unit number level, project level or share level. And you can even combine all type of data, whether unencrypted or encrypted in a system.

Take advantage of Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4 and extend your Oracle Database 12c investments. Call Four Cornerstone now and we will show you how.

Photo by Oracle.

Scroll to Top