VIRTUALIZE, MANAGE, BACKUP, CONSOLIDATE:

VIRTUALIZE, MANAGE, BACKUP, CONSOLIDATE: Simplifying Key Datacenter Initiatives with Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

Contents Oracle Sun ZFS Solution Brief Package Introduction... 3 Virtualization with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance... 4 Comprehensive Data Management for Oracle Database ZFS Storage Appliance Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller Plug-In... 9 Adding Value to Oracle Data Guard DR Copies with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance... 12 Disaster Recovery for Oracle Fusion Middleware with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance... 14 Consolidate and Standardize Storage with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance... 16 Oracle Database Consolidation with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance... 20 2

SOLUTIONS GUIDE TO SIMPLIFYING KEY DATACENTER INITIATIVES WITH ORACLE'S SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line radically simplifies the way that organizations manage their storage. It combines industry-leading performance, density, and efficiency with a rich suite of integrated data services and storage management software that is included at no extra cost. Never before has storage been so flexible, so powerful, while also helping to reduce operating costs, making it the perfect storage platform for mission-critical deployments in the modernized datacenter. What s more, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is optimized and integrated with other Oracle servers, software, and operating systems, making it easier and more efficient to achieve key objectives in the datacenter. From database consolidation to server virtualization, from database duplication for development and testing to data management and data recovery, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can help you simplify management, get a clear picture of your system s operation and any bottlenecks, and boost performance through the smart caching of Hybrid Storage Pools (HSP) technology. The following solution briefs lay out in detail the ways that Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance facilitates, simplifies, and speeds up all of these common datacenter goals. 3

VIRTUALIZATION WITH THE SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE A COST-EFFECTIVE STORAGE CONSOLIDATION SOLUTION THAT REDUCES INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS, IMPROVES PRODUCTIVITY, AND SIMPLIFIES DATACENTER MANAGEMENT KEY FEATURES The Shadow Migration feature of Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, which facilitates storage consolidation into the virtualization environment Data protection features such as snapshots, clones, and replication Storage provisioning made easy with point-and-click shares/mount points and thin provisioning Storage efficiency features such as thin provisioning, compression, and clones Storage analytics enabled by Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), providing observability into businesscritical storage workloads executing in virtual machines Datacenter sprawl is one of the larger challenges that datacenter managers are facing today. Over time, applications, servers, and storage can create many unique architectures across the IT infrastructure. This can introduce complexity, increase costs, and compromise business-critical application performance and availability. The Value of Virtualization to Storage Consolidation The key solution to datacenter application server sprawl today is server consolidation in the form of virtualization, because it can dramatically reduce datacenter costs and inefficiencies. Server consolidation in this paradigm is consolidating server compute resources that are distributed throughout the IT architecture and gathering them together to reside in one or more virtualized server platforms. The customer can choose from many virtualization solutions to resolve server sprawl. Oracle offers an enterprise-grade virtualization platform called Oracle VM, or OVM. There are others such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, both of which are ubiquitous in the Windows environment. Regardless of the solution, as you seek to resolve server sprawl issues, what naturally comes next in the design is how to deploy storage in a virtualized environment. KEY BENEFITS All features included with no extra license fees Instant recovery of data using snapshots and clones as well as Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy services Savings in power and cooling as well as in capital outlay for storage, with storage consolidation efficiencies Improvement in datacenter and business application productivity, which quickly adds to your bottom line Key integration with selected virtualization operating systems, improving virtual machine migration, performance, and data availability IT Architecture Before Server and Storage Consolidation. What many datacenter managers have discovered is that business-critical data is usually what governs how applications are architected and deployed in the IT infrastructure. For an effective server consolidation outcome, storage consolidation often occurs simultaneously with the goal of avoiding issues associated with islands of data, such as storage manageability and data protection issues, which can compromise business-critical application availability and performance, introduce complexity, and inflate cost. Prior to server and storage consolidation into a virtualization architecture, for example, servers and storage are often deployed in such a 4

way that, over time, one business-critical application often lacks storage or processing capacity while another has more then enough. While virtualization addresses the server-related issues, the lack of a common storage platform with powerful data protection, provisioning, and storage management features contributes to users duplicating copies of files and data, inflating the storage capacity requirement. This can often place data availability at risk, affecting the reliability of business-critical applications. Often, inefficiencies in this approach can cause storage overbuy, which unnecessarily increases the capital budget and inflates ongoing power and cooling costs. Sun ZFS Storage Appliance in a Virtualization Deployment Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is an ideal platform to deploy a storage consolidation solution in a virtualization environment. The business-critical applications running in your virtualization environment can benefit from powerful data protection and provisioning features. such as snapshots, clones, and replication, as well as compression and thin provisioning. These features efficiently manage capacity, reduce duplicate data, and provide instantaneous backup and recovery of data while facilitating the longer-term backup and recovery of data without loss of application and data availability. This contributes to improvements in productivity and reduces the need to unnecessarily purchase storage, while dramatically reducing power and cooling costs. IT Architecture After Server and Storage Consolidation. Simplifying deployment of business-critical data in a virtualization environment is essential, and the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides a key feature called Shadow Migration, which reduces risk during the storage consolidation effort and can, as an Oracle On Demand IT manager described, migrate a client as fast as the (data) share can be created, depending, of course, on the size of the data being migrated. 5

Operational efficiency is one of the critical goals when deploying virtualization. It benefits from the profound insight offered by DTrace Analytics, which provides illumination into business-critical storage workloads running in virtual machines, keeping business-critical-applications up and available. These key insights offered by DTrace include Sun ZFS Storage Appliance system activity from the kernel, to the virtual machine, to the application, and out to the network. Simplifying Storage in a Virtualization Environment A key design concept to consider in your virtualization deployment is how you can simplify the management of applications and their associated data in what might appear to be an increasingly complex infrastructure. When deploying and consolidating your storage in a virtualization environment, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance simplifies day-to-day tasks associated with protecting data, preserving storage capacity, managing mission-critical applications, and executing reliable daily backup procedures and restores. Provisioning and management are dramatically simplified in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, with an easy-touse management interface that takes the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning. In addition, the built-in suite of software data services and communication protocols eliminates add-on software evaluation and procurement hassles. DTrace Analytics software provides the industry s only comprehensive and intuitive analytics environment. Administrators are provided with tools to quickly and intuitively identify and diagnose system performance issues and perform capacity planning. Reliable Data Protection Protecting data is a key element in virtualization architecture. Sun ZFS Storage Appliance data services such as snapshots and clones provide instant, unattended, backup and recovery. These services are also supported in the Microsoft Windows environment via Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy services in the iscsi environment. Data protection tasks are further extended and simplified with built-in ZFS-based replication and, depending on the virtualization platform, are integrated into virtual machine migration services. Business-Critical Virtual Machine Storage Observability The easy-to-use and understandable user interface of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance enables rapid familiarity due to the simplicity that it offers in managing data, applications, and day-today datacenter tasks. For example, business-critical applications running in guest virtual machines with their associated storage workloads are easily managed using DTrace Analytics, which gives unprecedented visibility into bottlenecks and other issues that might exist in the virtualization storage and application infrastructure. Business-critical applications in their respective virtual machine environments can be observed instantly, and a drill-down feature can be used to see exactly where issues might be hindering business-critical application productivity such as overtaxed disks and files, an offending database client, real-time disk capacity, and CPU utilization, along with numerous other metrics. DTrace Storage Analytics.(Partial/Typical) 6

Flexibility, Speed, and Performance The success of your virtualization deployment is highly dependent on perceived application performance and a smooth, uneventful implementation. Performance is a multifaceted concept; with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, it means not only storage performance but also speed to deployment, application productivity, and rapid familiarity. Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Dashboard. Storage performance with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is provided by a breakthrough technology known as Hybrid Storage Pools, enabled by Flash SSD and the ZFS File System. Sophisticated file system algorithms enhance client read performance by pre-staging data into in-memory cache or DRAM, as well as Flash-based read-ssd, which can further improve IOP performance for guests virtual machines. Virtualization operating systems make extensive use of synchronous-write I/O and, due to this, guest virtual machines can automatically benefit from write Flash SSD to enhance write performance. This is because when a write is received by Sun ZFS Unified Storage, data is immediately cached in highly reliable Flash SSD, whereupon the virtual machine-based business-critical application is notified immediately that the write I/O has been completed. Striping, as well as mirroring SSD, works to enhance data protection for data in flight and can further improve application performance. Speed to deployment into a virtualization storage environment is all about reducing risk while moving data from islands of storage to one or more Sun ZFS Storage Appliance platforms that, in turn, have connectivity to one or more virtualization platforms. The Shadow Migration feature provides automated migration of data from legacy platforms to the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. This speeds deployment because there is virtually no downtime required during the migration of data, depending on the amount of data per application, to the consolidated storage paradigm, because the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance platform takes care of many of the details that would otherwise increase risk and consume deployment time and labor. A Cost-Effective Storage Consolidation Solution One of the key goals in deploying a virtualization architecture is to reduce costs. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers simplicity and superior performance at up to 30 percent less cost than traditional solutions by using cost-effective components and providing a rich set of builtin, all inclusive software features. Key data services that enhance your ability to manage and protect data in an operating virtualization environment such as snapshots, clones, replication, compression, thin provisioning, Shadow Migration, and more are included with no additional licenses. Other key features include comprehensive protocol support such as NFS, CIFS, FC, IB, and iscsi. All of these features come together to reduce your capital as well as operational expenditures. For example, during the virtualization and storage consolidation deployment, you can leverage thin provisioning, compression, and in-line deduplication to 7

improve storage efficiencies, reducing the amount of storage you would otherwise have to purchase. This prevents the awkward situation where some business-critical applications are under capacity while others are over capacity, so you can avoid unnecessary capital storage costs. This pays forward by reducing power and cooling costs with the efficient power/cooling technology inherent in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. Simply put, less storage means that you won t require the power and cooling that you otherwise would have consumed with more HDDs. 8

COMPREHENSIVE DATA MANAGEMENT FOR ORACLE DATABASE ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE ORACLE ENTERPRISE MANAGER GRID CONTROLLER PLUG-IN EXTENDING ORACLE ENTERPRISE MANAGER GRID CONTROLLER WITH UNPRECEDENTED OBSERVABILITY, COST-SAVINGS, PERFORMANCE ACCELERATION, AND SUPERIOR DATA PROTECTION KEY FEATURES Easily installs as a Plug In Single Pane of Glass view of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance based Oracle database infrastructure. Extends the already unprecedented observability of DTrace Analytics into the Oracle RDBMS Grid Visibility into Oracle RDBMS provisioning of storage with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Hybrid Storage Pool usage statistics and graphical displays. Observability of Oracle RDBMS usage of Network Filesystems and associated Performance IN depth displays and online reports with graphics and statistics to give detailed visibility into your Oracle infrastructure. Enterprise-wide database storage management has become a key ingredient for success with today's distributed data-intensive application environments. From the workgroup to the enterprise, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance software simplifies storage management and enables you to increase application performance and reliability while driving down costs. Its easy-to-use interface and comprehensive analytics naturally integrate with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller. The full integration gives you everything you need to monitor and manage your entire Oracle RDBMS distributed infrastructure from a single console and in concert with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, increasing storage efficiencies and enabling you to quickly resolve issues in your application storage infrastructure. Simplicity in an increasingly complex storage infrastructure Distributed database storage architectures introduce complexity into a storage infrastructure as well as a support organization. As data proliferates, the need for simplifying the day to day activities related to monitoring and managing databases is critical. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller provides the ability to manage and monitor distributed Oracle databases from a single console. With the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller Plug-In for the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, a DBA and Storage Administrator now have at a glance observability into database and storage availability, capacity utilization, and performance on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. KEY BENEFITS Easy for the Storage Administrator and the DBA to collaborate to identify and resolve issues as well as optimize performance Ability to easily observe performance and capacity Reduced storage complexity and increases DBA efficiency Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller Share Capacity & Cache Usage 9

The Plug-In is quick and easy and installs in minutes after a simple download and quick point and click configuration task on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, deployment is complete Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller SS7000 Configure Dialogue Performance and Observability with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Software Sun ZFS Storage Appliance software enables you to achieve unmatched simplicity and easeof-use by extending its revolutionary DTrace Analytics functionality to Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller. The DBA has instant visibility via an easy to read graphical management and monitoring interface Dashboard that displays key metrics including performance, capacity utilization and availability. The comprehensive information displayed at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller console gives key insights into the performance, capacity utilization, and availability of Oracle databases on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. In addition, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance DTrace Analytics displays a full and comprehensive infrastructure-wide view including; storage, cache utilization, network bottlenecks, performance, database client information, and other key metrics that provide a single view of application, storage and network operations as they relate to the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller Network Performance Reduced Risk with Industry-leading Data Protection The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides the most comprehensive data protection in the storage industry with end to end data integrity, constant filesystem health and status checksum(s), Triple Parity RAID, and breakthrough self healing features. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller is further extended with Fault Management Architecture (FMA), the industry leading software feature for preserving data and instant alerts when issues do occur. FMA interface and messaging is built-in to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller 10

so that all self healing messages and critical system alerts related to databases and storage are brought to the attention of the DBA and other support staff. This works together to preserve and enhance database and storage availability for mission critical applications that are important to your business. FMA Alerts on the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Display Enabling Storage and DBA Efficiencies The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance further facilitates your support staff with a feature that allows the Storage Administrator to define administrative roles for the DBA and other key personnel in the support organization. This key feature facilitates teamwork and increases employee productivity within your organization between the DBA, Storage Administrator, System Administrator and Operations Manager enabling rapid detection of application issues as well as rapid response towards resolution. Savings that go to the bottom line The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is unprecedented in many ways and from a cost perspective it is truly unique. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance includes a rich set of data features, breakthrough technology, and requires no additional license fees for data services. This means that there is no additional cost or licensing fee associated with downloading, installing and deploying the Plug-In for Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller. Storage efficiencies embedded in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance including built-in Compression, In-line Deduplication, and thin provisioning improve your capital expenditures associated with your storage purchase. In addition, the Hybrid Storage Pool provides breakthrough performance by enabling storage and database clients Flash SSD storage performance with SAS-3 hard disk drives further driving down your costs by minimizing the number of spindles you have to buy to enable the performance you need for your mission critical application. IT architecture administration can be riddled with hidden costs. The administrator roles combined with the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Controller Plug-Ins enable your DBA, System Administrator, as well as Storage Administrator to focus on business related applications rather than infrastructure support. This along with DTrace Analytics works to increase availability, rapid identification and resolution of storage bottlenecks and other application issues directly related to your mission critical business applications. 11

ADDING VALUE TO ORACLE DATA GUARD DR COPIES WITH THE SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE ACCELERATE DEPLOYMENT WHILE REDUCING RISK AND COST KEY FEATURES Enhance the value of Oracle Data Guard DR copies Quickly identify how changes in code affect the storage system No new licenses required for Enterprise Edition customers Tested, validated, and supported by Oracle KEY BENEFITS Utilizes the included snapshot and remote replication services of Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Accelerates application deployment Requires no additional licenses to procure and manage Reduces risk in the deployment of the solution infrastructure Database administrators face the challenge of efficiently duplicating their large mission-critical databases to support continuous demands for application development and subsequent testing of the code. Accelerate Application Deployment Multiple copies (clones) are often required for each production database in order to support the many development and test activities associated with large production systems. It is important that the cloning process have zero impact on the production database. Although the basic method of creating a clone is to restore a database from a recent backup onto a different database server, it is soon obvious how such an approach is inefficient and highly time consuming. Without an efficient solution for cloning production databases, enterprises are saddled with substantial administrative burden that diverts attention from more time-critical support functions while increasing storage consumption and cost. Many Oracle customers have already deployed Oracle Data Guard to provide high availability and disaster protection for their mission-critical Oracle Databases. The addition of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance to Oracle s solution portfolio offers Oracle Data Guard users a unique opportunity to address their cloning requirements. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can easily be added to an existing Oracle Data Guard configuration to provide an industry-leading, lowcost, time- and space-efficient solution to enterprise requirements for snapshots and clones. It's very attractive and very accessible. In fact, it may be the most complete filer interface I've ever seen, blowing the doors off Network Appliance's Web-based manager. Paul Venezia, Infoworld, February 2009 (http://blogs.sun.com/chhandomay/ date/20090219) The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance: Effective Platform for Development, Test, QA The profound insight offered by Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) Analytics, and the included features and functionality of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, makes it an ideal platform for development, test, QA, and so on. Unlike traditional platforms, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance doesn t license its data services, such as thin provisioning, clones, compression, and so on, separately they re all included. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance fits into any Oracle Data Guard environment. Adding it to your existing Oracle Data Guard environment requires minimal procedural changes. In fact, the cloning process can be automated for you with pre-defined scripts and workflows. The acclaimed Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics provides insight into system activity from the kernel, to the application (in this case, database file level access), to the storage system, and out to the network. Based on Oracle s award-winning Oracle Solaris DTrace framework, Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics provides a view of activity at the individual database file level. Developers can now create code and see in real time the effect that their changes have on the storage system. 12

The Value of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers simplicity and superior performance at up to 30 percent lower cost than traditional solutions, by using cost-effective components and providing a rich set of built-in, no-licensing software features. You can use NFS, CIFS, FC, IB, or iscsi and leverage compression, deduplication, snapshot, clone, thin provisioning, and remote replication features at no extra charge. And no additional software licenses are required eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and license key management costs. Unlimited Clones at No Extra Cost Traditional methods of providing copies to a production database for development and test require as much space on the storage system as the original database for each copy. Sun ZFS Storage Appliance clones require no additional space upon creation. Only as new data is written to the clone does the clone require space in the storage system. In addition to the savings associated with not having to procure and manage additional license keys, the spacesaving features of Sun ZFS Storage Appliance clones save on space and power costs as well. Reduce Risk in Deployment Oracle Maximum Availability Architectures that are tested, validated, and supported by Oracle help reduce the risk associated with the implementation of your Oracle development and test environment. Oracle s Advanced Customer Services aid in optimizing your Oracle development and test architecture for your particular business requirements. Ease of Management Provisioning and management is dramatically simplified in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with an easy-to-use management interface that takes the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning. In addition, the built-in suite of software data services and communication protocols eliminates add-on software evaluation and procurement hassles. Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics software provides the industry s only comprehensive and intuitive analytics environment. Administrators are provided with tools to quickly and intuitively identify and diagnose system performance issues and perform capacity planning. With respect to provisioning, an independent validation study found, Overall, the Oracle [Solaris ZFS] Storage Appliance required 36 percent less time and was 30 percent less complex to manage than the NetApp Filer. These results are especially significant in organizations where administrators are frequently adding LUNS for a rapidly expanding pool of virtual servers. In regard to monitoring and troubleshooting, the independent study states, What these results show is that not only is the overall troubleshooting process less complex on an Oracle storage appliance, but also that the time required and the complexity of identifying, selecting, and viewing fresh monitor data is less, as well. 31% Less Time and 50% Fewer Steps. 13

DISASTER RECOVERY FOR ORACLE FUSION MIDDLEWARE WITH THE SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE COST-EFFECTIVE DATA PROTECTION FOR ORACLE FUSION MIDDLEWARE KEY FEATURES Protect Oracle Database with Oracle Data Guard based disaster recovery (DR) Protect Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) binaries, metadata, and configuration information with Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance replication-based DR Predefined scripts automate management of the DR process with Oracle Fusion Middleware KEY BENEFITS Utilizes the included snapshot and remote replication services of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Ensures reduced RTO and RPO for the Oracle Fusion Middleware environment Minimizes planned and unplanned downtime Maximizes utilization of DR site infrastructure for reporting, test, and development Offloads production OLTP site, enabling it to focus on transaction processing Enterprise middleware deployments need protection from unforeseen disasters, natural calamities, as well as planned downtime. While various products, such as Oracle Data Guard, help ensure the availability of the database, additional protection is required to ensure the availability of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Keeping Your Business Running According to Forrester 2009, more than 60% of North American and European companies rank upgrading their DR capabilities either critical or high priority. Why? Disasters and subsequent site failovers are not rare most of them are caused by commonplace events such as power failures, human failures, and localized flooding. Forrester also states that as stakeholders ranging from board members and auditors to regulatory agencies and strategic partners have become savvier about the impact of site failure, DR preparedness is now considered a fiduciary responsibility of an organization toward its stakeholders. Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) is the foundation for the Oracle application infrastructure, which enables Oracle business applications to be created and run efficiently. Protecting that infrastructure during site failure is critical for providing business continuity and meeting service-level agreements. For enabling business continuity, the infrastructure is duplicated to a physically remote site to prevent any site failures. By deploying the OFM infrastructure on a Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, the infrastructure data can be replicated to the remote site using the remote replication feature of the appliance. The database component is replicated using Oracle Data Guard. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, a Cost-Effective Platform for Disaster Recovery The flexible architecture and included features and functionality of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance make it an ideal platform to complement Oracle Data Guard for disaster recovery of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Unlike traditional platforms, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance doesn t license its data services (such as replication, thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, compression, and so on) separately they re all inclusive. You can easily install and implement a Sun ZFS Storage Appliance into your Oracle Fusion Middleware DR environment. In fact, the DR process is automated for you with a workflow of predefined scripts. Oracle Fusion Middleware has a number of critical files that are stored outside of the database. These binaries, configuration data, metadata, logs, and so on also require data protection to ensure availability of the Oracle Fusion Middleware. For these, the built-in replication feature of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is used to move this data to a remote DR site. 14

For DR protection, all non-database objects, including the Oracle binaries and Oracle Fusion Middleware configuration, are replicated using the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. For Oracle Database content, Oracle Data Guard is used to replicate the data for disaster protection. The database contains the data of Oracle Fusion Middleware repositories, as well as customer data. The Value of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers simplicity and industry-leading performance at up to 30 percent less cost than traditional solutions, by using cost-effective components and providing a rich set of built-in, no-licensing software features. You can use NFS, CIFS, FC, IB, or iscsi and leverage compression, deduplication, snapshot, clone, and data replication features without the hassle of software licenses eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in license key management costs. Remote Replication at No Extra Cost To protect Oracle Fusion Middleware product binaries, configurations, and metadata files, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance s Remote Replication feature is used. It offers a simple and effective automated solution for businesses that require offsite copies of production data in addition to local backups. By maintaining a replica of the primary data at a remote site, disaster recovery time is dramatically reduced compared to traditional offline backup architectures, The Remote Replication feature is used to create a copy of the Oracle Fusion Middleware environment from any Sun ZFS Storage Appliance (source) to another Sun ZFS Storage Appliance (target) at a remote location, through an interconnecting TCP/IP network that is responsible for propagating the data between them. The target Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can be located virtually at any distance from the source, either in the same campus as the source or on the other side of the world, as long as the interconnecting network has sufficient bandwidth to carry the data across. Data on the source system is periodically replicated to the target at user-defined intervals depending on the desired recovery point objective (RPO). Data transmitted between Sun ZFS Storage Appliances is encrypted using SSL. Maximize Utilization of Disaster Recovery Site Infrastructure In addition to the benefits previously listed, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can make the DR site more productive actually contributing to the company s productivity instead of just sitting there waiting for a disaster. At the DR site, the snapshot and clone features of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance 7000 series can create database instances that can be used for test, development, and reporting functions. Using the DR site for these functions offloads the main production site, so it can focus exclusively on transaction processing, improving service levels to the business. Simplify deployment, administration, and management. Ease of Management Provisioning and management are dramatically simplified in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with an easy-to-use management interface that takes the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning. In addition, the built-in suite of software data services and communication protocols eliminates add-on software evaluation and procurement hassles. Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) analytics software offers the industry s only comprehensive and intuitive analytics environment. Administrators are provided with tools to quickly and intuitively identify and diagnose system performance issues and perform capacity planning. 15

CONSOLIDATE AND STANDARDIZE STORAGE WITH THE SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE A COST-EFFECTIVE STORAGE CONSOLIDATION SOLUTION THAT REDUCES INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS, IMPROVES PRODUCTIVITY, AND SIMPLIFIES DATACENTER MANAGEMENT KEY FEATURES The Shadow Migration feature of Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, which facilitates storage consolidation Data-protection features such as snapshots, clones, and replication Storage provisioning offering point-andclick shares/mount points and thin provisioning Storage efficiency features such as thin provisioning, compression, and clones Storage analytics enabled by Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), providing observability of businesscritical storage workloads Datacenter sprawl is one of the larger challenges that datacenter managers are facing today. Over time, application and storage demand can cause diverse storage architectures in an IT infrastructure. This can introduce complexity, increase costs, and compromise business-critical application performance and availability. The Value of Storage Consolidation The key solution to datacenter sprawl today is storage consolidation because it can dramatically reduce datacenter costs and inefficiencies. Numerous storage architectures that are deployed across the datacenter infrastructure create barriers to sharing data, as well as creating storage inefficiencies. For example, often storage is deployed on separate application servers where one business-critical application lacks storage while another has more than enough. The absence of a common storage platform with powerful data protection features contributes to users duplicating copies of files and data, inflating the storage capacity requirement. The inefficiencies of this approach cause storage overbuy, which unnecessarily increases the capital budget and inflates ongoing power and cooling costs. Lack of powerful provisioning features and other data protection mechanisms often place data reliability at risk, affecting the availability of business-critical applications. KEY BENEFITS All features included with no extra licenses Instant recovery of data using snapshots and clones as well as Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy services Savings in power and cooling as well as in capital outlay for storage with storageconsolidation efficiencies Improvement in datacenter and business application productivity, which quickly adds to your bottom line Datacenter Sprawl Prior to Storage Consolidation 16

Introducing the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is an ideal platform for deploying a storage consolidation solution. Powerful data protection and provisioning features, such as snapshots, clones, and replication, as well as compression and thin provisioning, reduce duplicate data and provide instant backup and recovery of data. This increases productivity and reduces the need to unnecessarily purchase storage, while it dramatically reduces power and cooling costs. Simplifying deployment is critical, and the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides the Shadow Migration feature, which reduces risk during the storage consolidation effort and can, as an Oracle On Demand IT manager described, migrate a client as fast as the (data) share can be created, depending on the size of the data to be migrated. Operational efficiencies improve with the profound insight offered by Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics, which provides illumination into business-critical storage workloads, keeping business-critical applications up and available. These key insights offered by Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics benefit Sun ZFS Storage Appliance system activity from the kernel, as well as the application and the network. Built-in Features That Simplify a Complex Storage Environment Prior to the deployment of storage consolidation with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, day-today tasks associated with protecting data, preserving storage capacity, enabling missioncritical applications, and executing daily backup procedures and reliable restores were complex and difficult. Provisioning and management is dramatically simplified in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with an easy-to-use management interface that takes the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning. In addition, the built-in suite of software data services and communication protocols eliminates add-on software evaluation and procurement hassles. Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics software provides the industry s only comprehensive and intuitive analytics environment. Administrators are provided with tools to quickly and intuitively identify and diagnose system performance issues and perform capacity planning. Reliable Data Protection Sun ZFS Storage Appliance data services such as snapshots and clones provide instant, unattended backup and recovery via the storage administrator or the user. These services are not only available to the rank-and-file shared storage user but also to Microsoft Windows users via Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy services in the iscsi environment. Data protection tasks are further extended and simplified with built-in ZFS-based replication. Business-Critical Storage Observability The easy-to-use and understandable user interface enables rapid familiarity due to the simplicity it offers in managing data, applications, and day-to-day datacenter tasks. For example, business-critical applications and associated storage workloads are easily managed using Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics, which gives unprecedented visibility to bottlenecks and other issues that might exist in the application IT infrastructure. Business-critical applications can be observed instantly and a drill-down feature can be used to see exactly where issues might be hindering business-critical application productivity such as overtaxed disks and files, an offending database client, real-time disk capacity, and CPU utilization, along with numerous other metrics. Flexibility, Speed, and Performance Speed is a multifaceted concept; with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, it means not only storage performance but also speed to deployment, application productivity, and rapid familiarity. 17

Storage performance with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is provided by a breakthrough technology known as Hybrid Storage Pools, enabled by Flash SSD and the Oracle Solaris ZFS File System. Sophisticated file-system algorithms enhance client read performance by prestaging data into in-memory cache or DRAM, as well as Flash-based read.ssd, which can further improve IOP performance. Storage client synchronous write I/O can automatically benefit from write Flash SSD to enhance write performance. Storage performance can be further improved by striping as well as mirroring SSD, which also works to enhance data protection for data in flight. Speed to deployment is all about moving data from islands of storage to one or more Sun ZFS Storage Appliance platforms, quickly and with minimal risk. Shadow Migration is a built-in feature that provides automated migration of referenced data from legacy platforms to a Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. This speeds deployment because there is virtually no downtime required during the migration of data to the new consolidated storage paradigm, because the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance platform takes care of many of the details that would otherwise consume deployment time and labor. Storage Consolidation with Sun ZFS Unified Storage 18

A Cost-Effective Storage-Consolidation Solution The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers simplicity and superior performance at up to 30 percent lower cost than traditional solutions, by using cost-effective components and providing a rich set of built-in software features at no extra charge. Key data services that enhance your ability to manage and protect data, such as snapshots, clones, replication, compression, thin provisioning, Shadow Migration, and more, are included with no additional software licenses. Other key features include comprehensive protocol support such as NFS, CIFS, FC, IB and iscsi. All of these features come together to reduce your capital as well as operational expenditures. For example, during the storage consolidation deployment, you can leverage thin provisioning, compression, and in-line deduplication to improve storage efficiencies, reducing the amount of storage that you have to purchase. This prevents scenarios in which some applications are under capacity while others are over-capacity, so you can avoid unnecessary capital storage costs. It reduces power and cooling costs with the efficient technology inherent in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, so you won t require the power and cooling that you otherwise would have consumed with more HDDs. 19

ORACLE DATABASE CONSOLIDATION WITH THE SUN ZFS STORAGE APPLIANCE INCREDIBLE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES KEY FEATURES Database consolidation Oracle s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance supports multiple databases Increased application performance Automatic data placement on storage tiers Advanced analytics KEY BENEFITS Increased operational efficiency Improved resource utilization 30 percent lower cost than traditional storage Increased DBA productivity Databases, the backbone of business operations, are not all alike. Transactional databases are different from analytical databases and test databases are different from production databases. Each type of database requires a different level of storage resources and administrator attention to meet SLAs and other business needs. Invariably, as new applications are deployed, and as mergers and acquisitions occur, or as the business evolves and grows, the number and types of databases proliferate throughout the organization. This typically results in escalating inefficiencies and costs, which in turn drive database consolidation initiatives. Unlike traditional solutions, the flexible architecture of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance series is uniquely well suited for database consolidation. The architecture easily supports multiple databases while accommodating specific and changing performance and capacity requirements now and into the future. The platform can also gracefully co-exist with traditional architectures in the datacenter and can easily be installed in minutes. No special training to configure or administer the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is required. Consolidations using the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance platform can result in greatly improved resource utilization and operational efficiencies, the increased ability to meet SLAs, a reduction in complexity, and a significant cost savings. Breakthrough Simplicity, Performance, and Savings The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers superior performance and simplicity at up to 30 percent lower cost than traditional solutions. The storage architecture of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is based on cost-efficient industry standard components and a robust software stack. While many other vendors charge licensing fees for protocols and data services such as CIFS, NFS, iscsi, thin provisioning and replication, de-duplication and compression these and other software features are included in the base price of Sun Storage 7000 Systems. No additional software licenses are required. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers further economic value by reducing energy consumption and datacenter space requirements. Breakthrough Data Placement: Hybrid Storage Pools (HSP) Determining and controlling what type of media the consolidated database s data should be stored on presents significant challenges to users of traditional storage systems. These challenges are further complicated as data value changes over time. Traditional solutions that rely on static RAID configurations based on different sizes and speeds of disk drives may work well for a single database controlling data placement in a simple system can be fairly straightforward. However, when multiple and independent systems need to share storage resources as in the case of database consolidation keeping the right data on the right media at the right time becomes a significant and complex management task. In addition, changes in 20

UNIQUE HYBRID STORAGE POOLS Dramatically optimize database and application performance and reduce I/O bottlenecks with no administrator intervention via automatic and intelligent data placement across the storage hierarchy (DRAM, SSD, and HDD) business processing rapidly drive variations in system usage that can result in suboptimal data storage. Because it is difficult to manually balance system resources to reflect changing business needs, it is not uncommon for nearly idle data to be inefficiently stored on relatively fast and expensive storage resources, while critical data is referenced from much slower highcapacity storage media. Advanced Analytics Improves operational efficiencies by providing powerful insights into data storage workload requirements for proactive system troubleshooting, improved resource provisioning, and accurate capacity planning FULLY INTEGRATED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE STACK Includes a full suite of data services that are normally sold separate are included and reduces license key management complexity Product Support Services Figure 1. Hybrid Storage Pools Automatically Placing Data on Storage Tiers Depending on Business Value. In such cases, resolving the problem if it is identified may require intervention or even system outages to migrate the various data to the appropriate media. As business patterns and application needs invariably change, the situation could reverse requiring a migration of the data back to its original location. The unique hybrid storage pool (HSP) capabilities of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provide an effective solution for efficiently optimizing data placement and customer satisfaction. HSPs dynamically and intelligently cache active data over multiple tiers of storage media without the need for administrator intervention. Since the HSP provides around-the-clock automatic caching, changing business needs are easily and efficiently processed by the storage system. The most active applications can reference their data from the higher-performance, lower-capacity storage resources, while data from idle applications is safely protected on slower, higher-capacity storage. As once-critical data becomes idle over time, the HSP automatically moves it out of the cache so that newly imported data can quickly replace it to meet the performance needs of the now-active application. The efficiencies made possible by HSPs enable significant cost savings. HSPs remove operational expenses associated with shuffling data manually, and they reduce revenue losses related to poorly performing business applications. HSPs also reduce capital expenses by greatly improving storage capacity utilization. As the HSP dynamically adapts to changes in data-usage activities, there is a lower probability that idle data will be stored on expensive, high-speed media thus freeing that media to serve more critical active-application data needs. This results in less need to procure and provision expensive, high-performance storage to maintain a given quality of service. Similarly, the traditional costs of protecting active data by providing duplicate media in the cache is also unnecessary, because the HSP will continue to store complete copies of application data on the less expensive, high-capacity media. Finally, relative to traditional mirrored storage systems with the same amount of physical storage media, HSPs enable additional savings by delivering up to twice the effective capacity of the available media a 100 percent increase in storage utilization efficiency. Meanwhile, HSPs automatically increase application performance by making the entire infrastructure appear as fast as solid-state flash storage. 21

Breakthrough System Monitoring: Analytics System planners and administrators tasked with consolidating databases to a central storage resource can quickly lose expected financial gains if risk mitigation leads to overprovisioning system hardware, or if a complex, performance-related escalation consumes IT staff time or cuts into top-line revenue. Because traditional storage systems lack comprehensive performance monitoring and accounting tools, planners often must use very rough estimates to make critical architecture decisions or to mitigate the risk of a mistake or problem. This often results in the significant overdesigning of the system. Similarly, a lack of clear and concise historical and real-time system behavior information can make it difficult to determine the cause of a performance problem. For example, was the problem caused by a change in how the business was using data, a failure outside of the storage system, or a failure in the storage system itself? Typically, when available information does not clearly and accurately show the root cause of the problem, escalation of resolution time and operational cost increases. Figure 2. Analytics Example Displaying the Time When Specific Oracle Database Files Were Accessed. The unique analytics capability of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance solves these problems by changing the instrumentation paradigm for storage systems. Building on the comprehensive health-monitoring features common in the Sun product portfolio, Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) Analytics offers the industry s most advanced system performance monitoring environment. Beyond showing administrators a list of failed components, Oracle Solaris DTrace Analytics, as depicted in Figure 2 and Figure 3, provides unique real-time views of the performance of vital system parameters. Figure 2 shows a record of the time Figure 3. Analytics Showing I/O Throughput Performance by Individual Host. 22