Oracle Installs Analytics Into Newest ZFS NAS Appliance

Oracle has managed to get a new storage product out of the development shed before the end of the calendar year.

This one is the company’s latest network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4, which sports data analytics for pluggable databases, encryption and about 30 other enhancements.

Oracle claims ZFS Storage ZS4-4, which is engineered directly to Oracle Database 12c and doesn’t work optimally with other databases, is the industry’s only storage system with installed analytics for pluggable databases. It doubles previous-generation performance to enable faster time to actionable intelligence and smarter, more competitive business decisions, the company said.

Oracle ZFS Storage ZS4-4, which became generally available Dec. 2, also provides high-level protection against security breaches with its fine-grained, simple-to-use encryption capabilities.

The new NAS system provides pluggable database-level visibility into thousands of containers across an enterprise; the analytics can be used to simplify and accelerate storage performance tuning and troubleshooting in Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Multitenant environments. In comparison, Oracle said, EMC and NetApp storage systems see thousands of Oracle Database 12c pluggable databases as one instance, requiring manually intensive tuning and guesswork.

ZS4-4 uses the industry’s only in-memory, DRAM-based hybrid storage pool architecture and a multithreaded symmetric multiprocessing OS that takes advantage of all 120 cores in parallel and 3TB DRAM per cluster. Up to 90 percent of system I/O is produced from DRAM to accelerate application performance.

All Oracle ZFS storage appliances include Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit data-at-rest encryption at the project, share or LUN level. It also has the capability to combine encrypted and nonencrypted volumes in a system, Oracle said.