Oracle on Feb. 7 introduced a new storage file system for applications
running in a private cloud, called—appropriately enough—Oracle Cloud File
System.
The new file system automates much of a system's storage data management
capabilities and institutes storage pooling across files, middleware and
applications in a cloud. The idea is to extend cloud
characteristics to existing storage by enabling more effective storage pooling
through a network-accessible elastic storage cloud.
When optimized, Oracle Cloud File
System is designed to give new life to older or siloed storage systems, making their contents more easily accessible to other parts of the enterprise.
Pooling is an approach to storage virtualization that delineates specific
areas of the storage system to be dedicated to specific data flows, in order to
enable more efficient multitenant service deployments.
Virtualized storage systems break files into chunks of data that are
dispersed into numerous data center or storage locations and reassemble them
on demand. Keeping data file chunks closer together in pools provides faster reassembly of file chunks.
Oracle combined its Automatic Storage
Management Cluster File System and Oracle Automatic Storage Management
Dynamic Volume Manager to comprise the cloud file system.
Aggregates Earlier Cloudlike Features
"What it does is leverage a lot of the cloudlike features that we have
built over the last couple of releases," Bob Thome, Oracle Director of Product Management, told eWEEK.
"This file system and the storage pools take the data and distribute it
all across the disks and LUNs [logical unit numbers] that are available to it.
It stripes everything for you and assures you that there aren't going to be any
bottlenecks."
File system features, according to Thome, include:
- Providing shared pooled storage with unified namespace for applications, operational files, and user files;
- Accessing storage either directly over a storage network or over traditional networks;
- Rapidly growing, shrinking, and migrating storage pools while applications are online;
- Snapshots and replication of files and file systems for backups and disaster protection;
- Data access security and encryption to protect from security threats;
- Easy aggregate management operations via file tags.
The Oracle Cloud File System is available now and is priced at $5,000 per
processor. However, it is available free of charge for storing Oracle software binaries,
metadata and diagnostic files. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply, though, so be sure to read the fine print.
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