Simulator for ZFS Storage appliances available to download.

Posted by : Dr. Root | 21 October, 2010 | Published in

Oracle's Unified Storage Simulator makes it possible to install and manage a virtual storage system on any laptop or desktop and experience the power of Open Storage. Get a feel for breakthrough storage features, including:

  • A graphical interface that lets you choose which replication profile makes the most sense for the storage that will be managed by your appliance.
  • Oracle's Solaris DTrace analytics, a dynamic tracing framework that gives you insight into storage performance data
  • Support for various data protocols, including CIFS, NFS, iSCSI – and more!

"The Sun Unified Storage Simulator is great!! It has allowed me to simulate and learn all about the Sun Storage 7000 series box in a variety of virtual scenarios. Again, thank you for this free simulator!"– Robert F Tayne, computer systems analyst

Download this free virtual simulator.

Oracle Unveils Next-Generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Product Line

Posted by : Dr. Root | 14 October, 2010 | Published in

Unified Storage Systems Increase Throughput By Up To 50 Percent, Accelerate Business Performance and Lower Costs

Facts
  • Extending its innovation leadership in the unified storage industry, Oracle today introduced its next-generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line.
  • This line of powerful storage appliances sets a new benchmark in Unified Storage, with 50 percent more performance, two times more storage capacity, nearly three times more processing power, and storage analytics utility with DTrace Analytics.
  • The ZFS Storage Appliance product line includes best-in-class management software and an innovative hybrid storage pool architecture that has been integrated with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, to provide optimal business system performance. The products deliver the leading throughput, flexibility and ease of use demanded by organizations using storage for cloud computing, virtualization, storage consolidation and data protection.
  • The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line provides three new tightly integrated data protection solutions for Oracle Applications: Oracle RMAN backup optimizes backup with Sun ZFS Storage Appliances, Oracle Database Cloning increases database performance by integrating Sun ZFS Storage Appliances with Oracle Data Guard, and Oracle Fusion Middleware simplifies disaster recovery with ZFS Storage Appliances. These offerings extend Oracle’s list of over 70 qualified software solutions with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line.
  • The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line combines an innovative Flash Hybrid Storage Pool architecture for file and block workloads with powerful and intuitive DTrace Analytics for storage and web-based management, enabling organizations to deploy new applications faster and lower administrative costs by up to 50 percent.
  • The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line delivers leadership data protection, storage efficiency costs and higher performance and scalability. For example, the Sun ZFS Storage 7720 Storage Appliance provides 1.6 times better storage density than other unified storage solutions.
  • The new Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line ranges from entry-level configurations starting at 12 TB to high-end systems that support more than 1 PB of storage capacity. All systems feature high-density disks and flash acceleration.

    Higher Performance, Leading Data Protection and Simplified Management
  • Complete Unified Storage:
  • Ideal for consolidating Oracle Applications, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the only unified storage appliances that can simultaneously run all major block and file protocols (Infiniband, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS), includes a complete suite of data services (triple-parity RAID, deduplication and compression), and can scale to 50 percent more server connections then the competition.
  • Best-in-Class Management: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line has been integrated with Oracle’s business software. Studies have shown that it reduces management complexity by 30 percent and improves storage administrator productivity by 35 percent when compared to NetApp solutions.
  • Maximum Storage Efficiency: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the only unified storage solution that combines in-line deduplication and compression built into the unified storage controller to increase storage efficiency for primary storage by up to 90 percent.
  • Leading Data Protection: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the only unified storage solution with end-to-end data and metadata checksums, self-healing data technology and triple-parity RAID, making ZFS Storage Appliances ideal for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, and the Oracle E-Business Suite environments. In addition, the ZFS Storage Appliance product line includes unlimited snapshots and clones, making it ideal for high performance backup, data protection and disaster recovery deployments for Oracle Applications and Oracle Software.
  • Reduced Costs: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line lowers CAPEX and OPEX by one-third with Oracle’s unique flash hybrid storage pool technology, industry leading storage density, reduced power utilization and improved storage administrator productivity compared to competitive offerings. Every data protocol and data service, including file and block protocols, deduplication, compression, replication and clustering is included for the single price of the system.
  • Greater Performance and Scale: The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the ideal platform for storage consolidation and refresh, with a 50 percent increase in throughput and support for multiple concurrent data services. The industry’s fastest storage controllers with industry-leading amounts of DRAM and flash cache enable Sun ZFS Storage Appliances to support a mix of file and block level access for Windows and UNIX data, allowing customers to achieve 3:1 or greater reduction in the number of storage systems while increasing performance and lowering costs.
  • Cloud-Ready Storage: The ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the latest addition to Oracle’s complete portfolio of cloud-ready software and hardware products, designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructure. In cloud environments, they enable customers to deploy applications faster and at a lower cost.

    Supporting Quotes
    “Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances have gained strong industry recognition with an innovative architecture that enables customers to cut their enterprise storage costs in half and speed application deployment,” said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president, Server and Storage Systems. “The next-generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line delivers more than 2x the scale of the previous generation and increase integration with Oracle’s business-critical applications.”

    “When the 7000 Series first hit the market, its massively impressive capabilities - including auto-tiering, compression and deduplication, and advanced analytics - might have seemed a little incredible in an easy-to-use and economical unified storage platform,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, the Enterprise Strategy Group. “But now that it is time-and-market-proven, and has added scale and performance with these latest upgrades, any excuses for not taking a look are getting pretty hard to come by.”

    Supporting Resources
    Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Series Family Data Sheet
    Oracle’s Sun Unified Storage


  • Oracle Unveils SPARC T3 Processor and SPARC T3 Systems

    Posted by : Dr. Root | 29 September, 2010 | Published in

    Industry’s First Servers Based on 16-Core Processor Deliver 2x Performance Increase Over Previous Generation SPARC T-Series Systems

    News Facts
  • Demonstrating Oracle’s leadership in mission-critical computing and its commitment to the SPARC platform, Oracle today announced the industry’s first 16-core server processor and new SPARC T3 systems.
  • The systems range from a single socket 16-core blade to a 4-socket, 64-core server with 512 threads in a compact five-rack unit, providing extreme scalability and performance with built-in security and virtualization capabilities. Many SPARC T3 server models are expected to begin shipping in the next 30 days.
  • The SPARC T3 systems running Oracle Solaris and Oracle VM for SPARC, and tightly integrated with Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, deliver highly optimized system performance, efficiency and scalability for customers running mission-critical applications.
  • Highlighting the unrivaled performance and benefits of tightly engineered Oracle software and Oracle hardware, the SPARC T3 systems have achieved nine world-record results, including a SPECj Enterprise2010 result, announced today.(1)
  • The new SPARC T3 systems are integral to Oracle’s strategy to offer the most complete, open and integrated application-to-disk solutions.

    Integrated Systems Deliver Extreme Scalability, Built-in Security and Virtualization
  • The SPARC T3 systems deliver unparalleled performance and scalability to meet explosive data growth and new datacenter requirements from Web and application-tiers to the database tier.
    The new systems provide customers with a 2x increase in performance over the previous generation of SPARC T-Series systems.
    Showcasing extreme scalability, the SPARC T-Series systems have achieved nine world-record results on multiple industry standard benchmarks and prominent application workloads.
  • These systems deliver industry’s first advanced chip-level encryption capabilities and built-in virtualization to improve security and performance at lower costs, making them ideal for cloud computing infrastructures.
    The SPARC T3 systems feature integrated on-chip cryptographic accelerators that deliver wire speed encryption capabilities, providing customers with critical data and services protection.
    Using the newly announced Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0, the SPARC T3 systems offer advanced virtualization and have multiple virtual machines ranging from one per core to 128 virtual machines on a single server, delivering greater efficiencies and lower costs through consolidation.
  • Application-to-disk integration provides comprehensive systems management capabilities to improve efficiency and lower costs.
    The SPARC T3 servers are tightly engineered with Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, including Oracle’s Siebel CRM and Oracle WebCenter Suite, to deliver complete, optimized solutions that are more reliable, deliver better performance and are easier to deploy and manage.
    Oracle Enterprise Manager: provides integrated application-to-disk management and integrated server lifecycle management through Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, helping reduce IT management costs.
    Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager features an integrated service processor with power management and power capping capabilities to help reduce energy costs.
  • The SPARC T3 systems are the latest addition to Oracle’s complete portfolio of cloud-ready software and hardware products designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructure.

    Supporting Quote“Oracle’s SPARC product line is the cornerstone of our strategy to deliver customers a complete, open and integrated apps-to-disk solution,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Server and Storage Systems, Oracle. “These new SPARC T3 systems deliver on our commitment to provide customers with a 2x increase in performance every two years and deliver massive scalability for high compute environments like cloud computing.”

    “Fujitsu has enjoyed selling the SPARC Enterprise T-Series products since 2007. With the doubling of the throughput in the new T3 products, we are very excited about the huge benefits these products will provide to our customers,” said Noriyuki Toyoki, corporate senior vice president, Fujitsu Limited.

    “Running Oracle Siebel CRM on Sun servers has delivered superior application performance and systems utilization,” said Randy Nitowski, Infrastructure Manager, Subaru. “We are excited about the new SPARC T3 servers’ ability to provide tighter software and hardware integration and expanded virtualization capabilities, with even better performance and scalability. The new servers will enable Subaru to further improve customer relationships while lowering costs.”
  • Oracle Solaris 10 Update

    Posted by : Dr. Root | 13 September, 2010 | Published in

    WHY ORACLE SOLARIS?

    Oracle Solaris is the #1 Enterprise OS and the best platform to run your mission-critical applications.

  • Oracle Solaris provides industry-leading performance and scalability
  • The proven reliability of Oracle Solaris gives customers built-in fault tolerance through features such as ZFS, DTrace and Predictive Self Healing
  • Highest levels of enterprise-class security with Common Criteria Certification
  • Oracle Solaris is supported by more than 11,000 third-party applications and over a thousand systems—more than any other enterprise operating system

    See Oracle Solaris News and Announcements

    More
  • Oracle Delivers Oracle Solaris Enhancements

    Posted by : Dr. Root | | Published in

    Latest Update of the #1 Enterprise Operating System Provides Mission-Critical Security, Reliability and Performance on SPARC and x86 Systems
    News Facts
  • Building on its leadership in the enterprise operating system market, Oracle today announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 and Oracle Solaris Studio12.2.
  • 10 of the top 10 Telecommunications Companies, Utilities and Banks use Oracle Solaris.
  • Oracle Solaris is now developed, tested and supported as an integrated component of Oracle's "applications-to-disk" technology stack, which includes continuous major platform testing, in addition to the Oracle Certification Environment, representing over 50,000 test use cases for every Oracle Solaris patch and platform released.
  • Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 provides networking and performance enhancements, virtualization capabilities, updates to Oracle Solaris ZFS and advancements to leverage systems based on the latest SPARC and x86 processors.
  • The Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 update includes new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications.
  • Oracle Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enable industry-leading performance, security and scalability for both existing and new systems.
  • Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 builds on Oracle Solaris to offer the most extensive, enterprise high availability and disaster recovery solutions.
    Enables virtual application clusters via Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition and integrates with Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g for consolidation in virtualized environments.
    Provides the highest level of security with Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions for mission-critical applications and services.
    Supports InfiniBand on public networks and as storage connectivity and is tightly integrated and thoroughly tested with Oracle’s Sun Server and Storage Systems.
  • Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 provides an advanced suite of tools designed to work together for the development of single, multithreaded, and distributed applications. With its integrated development environment (IDE), including a code-aware editor, workflow, and project functionality, Oracle Solaris Studio helps increase developer productivity.

    Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 features include:
  • Networking and database optimizations for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).
  • Oracle Solaris Containers now provide enhanced “P2V” (Physical to Virtual) capabilities to allow customers to seamlessly move from existing Oracle Solaris 10 physical systems to virtual containers quickly and easily.
  • Increased reliability for virtualized Solaris instances when deployed using Oracle VM for SPARC, also known as Logical Domains.
  • Oracle Solaris ZFS online device management, which allows customers to make changes to filesystem configurations, without taking data offline.
  • New Oracle Solaris ZFS tools to aid in recovering from problems related to unplanned system downtime.
  • Operating system, database and other Oracle Solaris patches are now verified and coordinated to provide the highest levels of quality, confidence and administrative streamlining.

    Resources
    Oracle Solaris
    Oracle’s Sun Server & Storage Systems
    Oracle Solaris Podcasts
    OTN - Oracle Technology Network
  • Exadata Offload - The Secret Sauce

    Posted by : Dr. Root | 14 July, 2010 | Published in

    The 'Secret Sauce' for Exadata is its ability to offload processing to the storage tier. Offloading means that the storage servers can apply predicate filters at the storage layer, instead of shipping every possible block back to the database server(s).

    Read more
    Copyright 2005-2010, ask|dr.root, brought to you by Avnet Technology Solutions