Driving Down the High Cost of StoragePillar Axiom 600

Accelerate Initial Time to Value, and Control Costs over the Long Term

3

Make a storage investment that will pay off in rapid time to value and low long-term financial risk with Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600.

Does it seem like only yesterday that you made a sizable investment in a storage area network (SAN), only to find that it already needs to be significantly upgraded or even replaced? With data size and complexity increasing all the time, and with SANs remaining the technology of choice for data center storage, it’s not surprising that legacy investments in storage infrastructure are failing to keep up. What’s needed is a storage infrastructure that can handle increasingly insistent data storage demands in order to deliver IT and business value both now and far into the future.

That’s an impossible challenge for traditional approaches to SAN storage, which were simply not designed to keep pace with data growth. It may be possible to add capacity to legacy systems to support critical applications, but this often comes at the expense of performance. Adding both capacity and performance generally requires frequent new hardware investments. The cost to acquire, deploy, maintain, and inevitably replace that hardware—not to mention the cost to expand the data center to accommodate it—ultimately becomes simply intolerable from a business standpoint.

Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 storage system is an alternative to traditional SAN storage. It shortens time to value and continues to deliver value over the long term by speeding application deployment and facilitating rapid access to data. It represents a fundamentally different approach: Storage adapts dynamically to changing appli-cation requirements from the start, scales to accommodate growing performance and capacity demands over time, and simplifies the storage infrastructure to keep ongoing administrative requirements to a minimum.

Pillar Axiom 600 enables companies to

• Eliminate costly, inefficient data silos

• Integrate with Oracle software and mixed application environments

• Support Oracle servers and multivendor hardware environments

• Be prepared for change with scalable capacity and performance

• Consolidate storage on one shared platform

• Simplify administrative tasks to keep costs down

4

Speed Time to Value with Rapid Deployment of Application-Aware Storage

Eliminate Costly, Inefficient Data Silos

Traditional storage solutions typically address different applications’ data needs by having dedicated storage for each application, resulting in a multitude of silos of data. These have to be deployed and maintained separately in order to meet performance requirements, which slows time to value and also minimizes that value, because capacity is used inefficiently.

Pillar Axiom 600, by comparison, is implemented as a single consolidated SAN storage platform that meets the storage needs of multiple applications simultaneously. It’s designed to be fast and simple to deploy, speeding time to value. And the value it achieves is greater than what traditional solutions can deliver because of its unique quality of service (QoS) capability, which dynamically and automatically allocates storage resources to applications based on their importance to the business.

Pillar Axiom 600’s QoS capability allows rapid, efficient allocation of storage, with minimal administrative overhead. It also automatically detects changes in application priorities and responds accordingly, making it possible to meet performance requirements without sacrificing utilization.

Integrate with Oracle Software and Mixed Application Environments

Reap the Benefits of Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together

The economic benefits of application-aware storage are available to any data center environment, regardless of the associated software stack. But the benefits are even greater in Oracle software environments, because the storage is engineered for Oracle software, with a number of unique integration points that are available only when Oracle storage is deployed with Oracle software. For example, Oracle Database includes a high-efficiency data compression feature—hybrid columnar compression—that only works with storage developed by Oracle, including Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems.

The ability to leverage hybrid columnar compression, integration with Oracle VM, and other unique benefits of the Oracle software environment further speed the time to value for Pillar Axiom 600, as well as lowering business risk for companies that deploy it with Oracle applications.

ABOUT SANS

Pillar Axiom 600 is an outstanding choice for companies that rely on storage area networks to store and protect data in the data center. In large enterprise networks, a single SAN can provide the scalability and perfor-mance needed to support growing amounts of data without constantly adding storage devices.

5

Invest in Storage for the Future, Not in Storage That’s Based on the PastUntil now, IT organizations had little choice but to make decisions about storage investments based on past experience—decisions largely driven by capacity requirements, with performance as an afterthought. Traditional architectures often required different applications to be kept on different storage systems to ensure predictable application performance. But if the recent history of IT has shown us anything, it’s that the growth in data capacity, variety, and application-driven storage performance requirements is wildly unpredictable. It’s impossible to tell from past experience when existing storage will pass a certain capacity threshold and begin to affect performance, for example, or whether a new application is going to trigger spikes in usage that impose greater demands on storage resources.

Be Prepared for Change with Scalable Capacity and Performance

Pillar Axiom 600 is designed to adapt to and accommodate change as it occurs, minimizing the financial risk of storage investments. Unlike traditional SAN solutions that are destined for costly replacement when they can no longer meet storage requirements, Pillar Axiom 600 is intended as a long-term, flexible platform on which to build over time. It scales flexibly and cost-efficiently from 12 TB of data to up to 1.66 PB, without sacrificing performance. Pillar Axiom 600 also enables migration to future environments—including cloud environments—without requiring a complete replacement of the storage infrastructure.

Leverage Features for Future-Proofing

Several specific features of Pillar Axiom 600 enable the storage platform to scale, removing storage bottlenecks and eliminating the risk of obsolescence.

• A modular architecture provides the ability to scale in performance and capacity, eliminating the bottlenecks that lead to forklift upgrades and enabling new components and storage classes to be swapped or added without downtime

• Distributed redundant arrays of independent disks add controllers whenever drives are added to increase capacity, reducing risk by ensuring that performance and capacity always scale simultaneously

• Storage domains make it possible to isolate pools of storage within the consolidated platform in order to easily and cost-effectively serve individual departments or applications

6

Keep Administrative Costs Low by Keeping Complexity Down

Consolidate Storage on One Shared Platform

Managing storage can be both costly and time-consuming when you have multiple devices from different vendors, all requiring different management tools. But that’s exactly how storage has been managed in traditional SAN environments, where each application is associated with a separate storage infrastructure.

Consolidation can dramatically reduce the administrative cost and time associated with managing multiple storage resources for a variety of types of data and systems. Pillar Axiom 600 requires minimal administrative resources since it uses a single, consolidated platform to house all the storage required for dozens or even hundreds of applications. It’s possible to host many applications on a single Pillar Axiom 600 storage system—compare that to legacy systems in which serving just 50 applications might require almost as many different storage systems.

Simplify Administrative Tasks

Reduce Resource Requirements by Making Storage Easy to Manage

From the interface that administrators use to interact with Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems, to the extreme degree of automation integrated into them, these systems are meant to be easy to use. It requires only a small administrative staff with minimal technical training to manage a Pillar Axiom–based environment with hundreds of terabytes of data from many different applications and with different service requirements. The user interface is designed to enable people without specialized storage knowledge to quickly provision data volumes and file systems, and the same interface can be used to manage any Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems that may be added in the future, eliminating additional management overhead and cost.

Furthermore, there’s little need to manually optimize storage, because integrated, automated functions within the system perform optimal data placement, control cache operations, and handle other tasks that would otherwise require a significant staffing investment. In addition, built-in guided maintenance allows staff to perform many maintenance tasks rather than requiring an onsite visit by a technician.

Make the Choice for Long-Term Storage Value: Pillar Axiom 600

In demanding data center storage environments, a SAN based on Pillar Axiom 600 provides the ease of use, ongoing scalability, and consistent performance to start delivering value immediately—and to continue to deliver it throughout the storage lifecycle.

QOS: A NOTE ON THE TECHNOLOGY

Quality of service is a familiar concept in networking and servers, but it has never been applied to the storage tier in the way that Oracle applies it with Pillar Axiom 600 storage system.

USING QOS TO SUPPORT CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 delivers application-aware storage, in which QoS is used to prioritize storage based on the relative importance of applications at any given time. It breaks the

“first in first out” paradigm by dynamically assigning resources where they are most needed, based on the business value of the application. Delivering dependable data access for multiple applications from a single storage platform is essential to controlling costs by consolidating storage resources, simplifying the storage infrastructure, and aligning performance with business value.

CONTACT US

For more information on Pillar Axiom 600, call +1.800.ORACLE1 to speak to an Oracle representative or visit oracle.com/storage.

OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA

Visit oracle.com/corporate/contact/global.html to find the phone number for your local Oracle office.

Oracle CorporationWORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores CA 94065 U.S.A.

WORLDWIDE INQUIRIESPhone: +1.650.506.7000 +1.800.ORACLE1

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Published in the U.S.A. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document  and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.

100020272 | C17943