Unified Storage 4 Dummies

Open the book and find:

• How to meet growing storage needs

• Ways to lower TCO with unified storage

• The benefits of maxi-mizing performance with flash technology

• How to reduce storage complexity in your data center

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Web-based applications, storage consolidation, virtualized environments, social networking, regulatory compliance, and high-performance computing applications are driving an explosive demand for more storage. Unified storage is an innovative, cost-effective, and scalable solution to the data storage challenge!

• Understand the data storage challenge — maximize per formance and capacity while minimizing cost and complexity

• Discover unified storage technology — deep dive into flash technology, hybrid storage pools, ZFS, and more

• Deploy a storage solution — plan the successful installation, migration, service, and administration of your unified storage solution

Conquering the data storage challenge with unified storage

Lawrence C. Miller, CISSP

• Maximize storage capacity

• Improve storage performance with hybrid storage pools

• Simplify storage management

Learn to:

Unified Storage

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by Lawrence C. Miller, CISSP

Unified Storage

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Unified Storage For Dummies®, Oracle Special Edition

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Contents at a GlanceIntroduction ........................................................................1

About This Book .................................................................. 1Icons Used in This Book ..................................................... 2

Chapter 1: Understanding Storage Challenges ...........3

Explosive Data Growth ....................................................... 4Performance Bottlenecks ................................................... 5Skyrocketing Costs .............................................................. 8Increasing Complexity ...................................................... 10Doing More with Less ....................................................... 11

Chapter 2: What Is Unified Storage? ...........................13

Defining Unified Storage ................................................... 13Key Oracle Storage Technology Innovations ................ 15Unified Storage Components ........................................... 22

Chapter 3: What Are the Benefits of

Oracle Unified Storage? ................................................25

Optimize Performance ...................................................... 26Simplify Management ....................................................... 29Reduce Costs ..................................................................... 29

Chapter 4: Deploying Oracle Unified Storage ............35

Installation ......................................................................... 36Data Migration ................................................................... 37Service ................................................................................ 39Administration ................................................................... 40

Chapter 5: Ten (Okay, Five) Things to Look For

in a Unified Storage Solution ........................................41

Flash Technology .............................................................. 41Hybrid Storage Pools ........................................................ 42Intelligent Management Software .................................... 43Analytics Capabilities ....................................................... 43In-Line Deduplication with Compression ....................... 44

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Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book and of the people who worked on it. For gen-eral information on our other products and services, please contact our Business Development Department in the U.S. at 317-572-3205. For details on how to create a custom For Dummies book for your business or organization, contact [email protected]. For details on licensing the For Dummies brand for products or services, contact BrandedRights&[email protected].

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Introduction

Digital data is growing at an explosive rate, creating data storage challenges for organizations every-

where. For example, it is estimated that Google pro-cesses about 24 petabytes (almost 25,000 terabytes) of data every day, and creating James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar reportedly took more than 1 petabyte of storage.

To address these challenges, organizations are seek-ing innovative and cost-effective data management solutions that provide performance, reliability, and scalability, without adding management complexity. Unified storage is one such solution.

About This BookThis book consists of five short chapters, each written as a stand-alone chapter, so feel free to start reading anywhere and skip around throughout the book!

Chapter 1: Understanding Storage Challenges. We start with a look at some of the business and technical challenges that organizations face in their storage envi-ronments today.

Chapter 2: What Is Unified Storage? In this chapter, we introduce you to a better solution for your storage challenges — unified storage.

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Chapter 3: What Are the Benefits of Oracle Unified Storage? Here, we explain some of the many benefits your organization can achieve with a unified storage solution.

Chapter 4: Deploying Oracle Unified Storage. In this chapter, we help you prepare to deploy a unified stor-age solution within your organization.

Chapter 5: Ten (Okay, Five) Things to Look For in a Unified Storage Solution. Here, in that famous For Dummies style, we give you the “Part of Tens” detailing a few things you should look for in a unified storage solution.

Icons Used in This BookThroughout this book, we occasionally use icons to call attention to important information that is particularly worth noting. But don’t bother trying to double-click any of them with your mouse! Here’s what to expect.

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Chapter 1

Understanding Storage Challenges

In This Chapter▶ Recognizing the need for more storage▶ Identifying application performance issues▶ Controlling cost and complexity▶ Getting the most out of people and technology

Managing data storage in today’s tough economic environment and highly competitive global mar-

ketplace is a major challenge for businesses and orga-nizations of all sizes, in all industries, everywhere. Common issues in traditional storage solutions include inadequate performance and scale, storage inefficien-cies, high deployment and operating costs, and com-plex management.

In this chapter, we explore the data storage challenge further.

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Explosive Data GrowthThe march of digital data growth continues at a stun-ning pace. In a May 2010 IDC Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC, it is estimated that by 2020, the dig-ital universe will grow to 35 zettabytes.

A terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes, a pet-abyte is equal to 1024 terabytes, an exabyte is equal to 1024 petabytes, and a zettabyte is equal to 1024 exabytes (or 1 trillion gigabytes).

The expanding use of automated sensors, high resolu-tion medical scanners, earth observation satellites, and high-performance technical computing applications across a broad range of industries is driving much of this data growth. In many industries — such as health care, life sciences, media/entertainment, and energy — and in specialized markets, such as video surveillance and product life-cycle management, the shift to digital content is now beyond the point of no return. These digital transformations are already spurring exponen-tial increases in image data and associated content.

At the same time, companies are leveraging more col-laboration, social networking, and Web-based business applications to boost productivity and improve cus-tomer support. Large databases are at the heart of many of these applications. Data mining and analysis of these databases for business intelligence to improve efficiencies and market opportunities is driving the need for storage-intensive data warehousing.

Finally, increased data retention and protection regula-tions and compliance requirements all contribute to the data-growth problem.



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The traditional method for dealing with these data increases has been to increase capacity: larger disk drives, larger disk systems, and multiple tiers of stor-age. While this approach has been adequate (up until now) for storing large amounts of data, it does not help organizations improve performance, eliminate waste, control costs, or reduce management complexity.

Performance BottlenecksToday’s enterprise applications require fast access to large volumes of information and databases, and are pushing the performance limits of traditional storage architectures.

Enterprise applications range from high-volume online transaction processing (OLTP) and database applica-tions to business intelligence applications.

Oracle database applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, often serve thou-sands of users with a single central database instance that is accessed for each transaction.

Web 2.0 applications run the gamut from blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking applications to Web serving, search engines, and video streaming. New applications arrive daily, changing the ways users create, manipulate, and store data.

Technical computing applications in markets from manufacturing and energy to scientific pursuit are now creating and analyzing unprecedented amounts of data. Increasingly large computational clusters of teraflop and petaflop scale are generating more data than ever before. Energy companies need storage for highly par-allel data streams to log well data and seismic



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data processing to find more reserves. Scientific data centers need storage to hold massive results from sim-ulations of everything from cellular processes to cli-mate change, and to post-process the resulting data to promote understanding of complex problems.

For many applications, performance is not bound by the CPU, but by I/O latency and throughput. These applications are being choked by disk drives that can no longer keep up with CPU performance, causing bottlenecks.

It is relatively easy to address data growth and storage capacity issues by adding more disk drives and arrays. It is not so easy to scale storage I/O (Input/Output) performance.

While Moore’s Law governs CPU performance improve-ments, disk drive performance has not kept pace (see Figure 1-1). Technological advances in CPU perfor-mance have outstripped disk drive technology by two orders of magnitude over the last decade. Thus, appli-cations are hopelessly starved by the demand for data and the inability of hard disk drives to keep up. Today’s fast multicore processor servers are approach-ing I/O processing capabilities in excess of one million I/O operations per second (IOPS). Disk drive perfor-mance is largely constrained by disk drive rotational speeds, which is limited to 300 to 400 IOPS in today’s fastest disk drives.

Moore’s Law refers to a prediction, made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, that processing power will double approximately every two years.



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Server

Multi-Core,Multi Socket CPUs

High PerformanceDRAM

15K RPM Disk Drives

Storage

• Today’s Multi-Core, Multi-Socket

application server design are increasingly held back by slow storage

• When requesting data, the server spends most of its time waiting for

storage

• Application performance remains

sluggish regardless of the Server CPU horsepower

• The traditional remedy of adding more DRAM or “short-stroking” HDDs

is both expensive and inefficient

Why Applications Don’t PerformWaiting for DATA

260Times

Slower

Figure 1-1: Server versus hard disk drive performance.

To compensate for this performance gap and slow seek times, application data is often spread across a large pool of 15K RPM disk drives that are “short stroked” for better performance. This effectively increases I/O throughput by enabling read-and-write operations to take advantage of multiple spinning disks, but nearly 3,000 drives would be required to handle one million IOPS which can easily be generated by today’s servers!

Short stroking limits the disk space used to the hard disk’s outer tracks so that the read/write heads don’t have to travel so far — significantly reducing seek latency. However, this also signif-icantly reduces available capacity to between 10 and 20 percent of the total disk space.



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This approach results in inefficiencies because the need for performance results in configurations with more disk drives than would be warranted based solely on capacity requirements. In addition to the capital cost of additional disk arrays and disk drives, the high power requirements of 15K RPM disk drives and the poor floor space utilization resulting from lack of par-tially filled disks also result in additional data center operating expenses for power, cooling, and space.

Another approach to compensating for slow disk access speeds is to deploy a large buffer of DRAM, so that an entire application’s working set can be stored in memory, thus reducing latency. Although DRAM offers very high performance, it is also quite costly and requires a battery backup due to its volatile nature.

Storage systems providers have responded by develop-ing solutions that use new or advanced technologies to meet customer requirements. Separate (and expensive) systems based on solid state storage have been avail-able for several years for customers with high perfor-mance requirements (and the budget to match). With the introduction of Flash-based solid state drives using standard interfaces, systems providers have a new tool to address performance challenges.

Skyrocketing CostsIT organizations are looking at every option to make storage more efficient — and less costly. In fact, stor-age has become the primary IT cost growth driver. Particularly during challenging economic times, busi-nesses cannot afford to ignore the upfront or long-term costs of storage.



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Unfortunately, most of today’s storage solutions remain proprietary, complex, and expensive. Organizations can no longer tolerate the high costs (and vendor lock-in) of proprietary storage or massive licensing fees and are looking for new ways to address their growing storage requirements.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the inefficient use of storage (purchasing additional disk drives and arrays primarily to improve performance rather than increase capacity) results in higher capital costs and operating expenses. Technical solutions to address the rising costs of storage and its inefficient use include networked storage, storage tiers, thin provisioning, deduplication, and storage consolidation.

Power, cooling, and physical space requirements for storage systems have also become very real con-straints driving many to rethink the way they deploy both computational and storage infrastructure. Energy costs are at a premium, and many corporate “green” initiatives focus on reducing IT data center costs.

According to a 2007 report by Juniper Media Corporation and The StorageIO Group, storage (includ-ing disk subsystems) consumes approximately 40 per-cent of data center power — and with a 20 percent cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR), it is the fastest growing consumer of data center electricity.

Finally, increased complexity in the data center is also driving up costs significantly faster than data center budgets are growing. Common issues such as server sprawl and the existence of storage silos (or “islands of storage”) add to this complexity and cost.



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Increasing ComplexityAs storage systems have evolved, their overall com-plexity has increased. Most of today’s storage systems require highly trained storage administrators to provi-sion and actively manage the environment. This adds time and cost to deployment of new storage systems and increases the ongoing cost of managing the environment.

Often, there is a need to manually provision storage or to manually move data to continually adjust applica-tion performance as business needs change. Even when hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions are deployed, they often require manual intervention for performance optimization or a costly deployment strat-egy that includes over-provisioning high-performance storage media so that more data can be cached, making storage administration a complex and time- consuming job.

Perhaps most important, with customers implementing or maintaining large storage networks, it has become increasingly difficult to troubleshoot and fix storage performance issues. Most storage management tools currently available offer limited visibility because they lack an end-to-end view that encompasses multiple layers from the CPU and application to the storage file system, operating system, and data services — so it isn’t uncommon for storage administrators to spend hundreds of stressful hours per year identifying and fixing storage configuration issues that limit applica-tion performance.



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In addition to massive scalability, flexibility, and radi-cally different storage economics, IT environments require storage solutions that offer greater simplicity and ease of use, and real-time diagnostics and tuning.

Doing More with LessToday’s worldwide economic crisis is forcing organiza-tions to do more with less. Not only are today’s appli-cations processing greater volumes of data, but much of the data must also be maintained over time and securely shared throughout a global community of users. While the need for data storage capacity contin-ues to grow rapidly, many IT budgets are flat or declining.

Increasingly, IT departments must support a diverse array of applications and complex technologies and manage more and more storage for the vast amounts of data that are generated, often with fewer people. Even in organizations that have managed to avoid significant downsizing, IT must do more with less.

For example, technical training may be reduced or eliminated in order to cut costs. Thus, IT personnel may be ill-prepared to support ever-changing and increasingly complex (and costly) storage technolo-gies, and instead must “figure it out themselves.” Virtualized servers are another way that organizations are doing more with less — maximizing server utiliza-tion while reducing costs. Server virtualization delivers strong economic benefits and makes greater use of consolidated, networked storage to achieve the cost savings from server consolidation. However, it also risks adding considerable management complexity and can disrupt finely tuned storage networks.



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IT organizations are also adapting to a major industry shift occurring in the use of disks as the initial target for backup and recovery solutions, which provide improved data protection with greater availability and continuity than previous solutions. These solutions enhance system backup performance and reliability, shorten file restore times, and are supported by major backup vendors. However, they introduce additional data protection technologies (such as snapshots and replication) — yet another element of the storage infra-structure that must be managed. And while they speed up and simplify some operations, these solutions are not without their own management and operational challenges.



Chapter 2

What Is Unified Storage?

In This Chapter▶ Integrating storage and software together in a single

solution▶ Mixing and matching hard disk drives, memory, and

Flash technology▶ Putting it all together in a unified storage platform

With flat to declining IT budgets, many organiza-tions are seeking innovative new storage solu-

tions to address their data-growth challenges. As computing, storage, and networking converge, solu-tions that make the most of innovative new technology and industry-standard building blocks will help organi-zations to better meet their storage needs.

In this chapter, we talk about one such innovative stor-age solution: unified storage.

Defining Unified StorageOrganizations today typically employ a mix of direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SANs) in their IT infrastructures and data centers (see Figure 2-1).



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Each server isconnected

over a network to astorage appliance

(file-based)

Each server isdirectly

connected to astorage array(block-based)

Each server hasits own storage

(internal orexternal)

Network AttachedStorage (NAS)

Storage AreaNetwork (SAN)

Direct AttachedStorage (DAS)

Figure 2-1: Different types of storage.

These “islands” of storage have typically been installed to support individual applications and have evolved, often without adequate consideration of a comprehen-sive storage strategy or capacity planning. Such an approach inevitably leads to:

✓ Wasted capacity due to disk overhead and dupli-cate data

✓ Limited scalability for future growth

✓ Disparate disk systems and technologies creating performance inefficiencies and support challenges

Unified storage brings the popularity of NAS data ser-vices to SAN environments. Organizations use unified storage to:



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✓ Share files (Windows, Linux, UNIX)

✓ Protect data (mirroring, RAID, snapshots, replica-tion, backup, and archiving)

✓ Reduce storage infrastructure with consolidation (file-based NAS using standard networking proto-cols and block-based SAN using Fibre Channel and iSCSI in a single unified storage platform)

✓ Virtualize server environments (shared storage for virtualization technology such as Oracle Virtual Machine and VMware’s vMotion, High Availability, and Distributed Resource Scheduling).

Key Oracle Storage Technology InnovationsVendors such as EMC and NetApp pioneered the uni-fied storage market years ago, bring SAN and NAS together with various technologies. Oracle makes a truly innovative unified storage solution with key tech-nologies, including hybrid storage pools, real-time ana-lytics, and robust storage management software available through standard browsers.

Hybrid storage poolsHybrid storage pool technology enables the seamless pooling of memory, enterprise Flash drives, and hard disk drives with Oracle Solaris ZFS (discussed later in this chapter). By automatically allocating space from pooled storage, depending on data access patterns,



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Oracle Solaris ZFS simplifies storage management and lowers cost and optimizes performance (see Figure 2-2).

DRAM

Write/Flash Read/

Flash

ScalableDeep HighCapacity

DiskStorage

Pool

Figure 2-2: Hybrid Storage Pools (HSP).

Rapid technological advancements — and the fact that Flash memory costs per gigabyte are dropping faster than hard disk drives on a year-over-year basis — make Flash technology a viable storage option in the enter-prise data center. Advantages of Flash include

✓ Performance. Flash technology completes opera-tions in microseconds, placing it between disk drives (milliseconds) and DRAM (nanoseconds) for access time. With no moving parts, Flash avoids the seek times and rotational latencies associated with disk drives. As a result, data transfers to and from solid-state storage media are faster than what electro-mechanical disk drives can provide — with enterprise Flash pro-viding tens of thousands to millions of IOPS



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(Input/Output Operations Per Second), com-pared to hundreds of IOPS for disk drives.

✓ Low power consumption. Disk drives draw signifi-cant amounts of power to operate the motor and spin the media. By contrast, Flash uses integrated circuits and lacks moving parts, thereby consum-ing only a fraction of the power of disk drives. In fact, enterprise Flash uses only 5 percent of the power used by disk drives when idle and as little as 15 percent when performing operations.

✓ Cost. Although a gigabyte of mechanical disk costs less than a gigabyte of enterprise Flash, price per total gigabyte of capacity is not the only way to measure cost. Effective capacity, price per IOPS, and operational costs must also be evalu-ated. As discussed in Chapter 1, environments seeking to optimize IOPS often “short-stroke” disk drives to reduce seek latency, which reduces the effective capacity of disks and increases their cost per gigabyte of available storage by between 4 and 10 times. In addition, as electricity costs rise and Flash memory costs decrease, the relative cost per available gigabyte and the cost per IOPS of Flash memory improves. For example, disk drives cost approximately $1.25/IOPS, compared to only $0.02/IOPS for enterprise Flash.

✓ Reliability. In addition to providing functionality similar to that of traditional hard drives, enter-prise Flash offers improved reliability features, resulting in significantly higher mean time between failures (MTBF) — 2.0 million hours versus 1.2 million hours for disk drives.



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A millisecond (ms) is 1/1000th of a second, a microsecond (μs) is 1/1000th of a millisecond, and a nanosecond (ns) is 1/1000th of a microsecond.

Enterprise Flash technology consists of three main components:

✓ NAND Flash. NAND Flash is used for primary back-end storage.

✓ DRAM. DRAM provides a local buffer to acceler-ate Flash write performance and maintain active data structures.

✓ Controller. A controller manages the back-end storage and buffer cache and provides a commu-nication interface to systems.

Enterprise Flash is now available in multiple form fac-tors including one called solid-state disks (SSDs) that is physically interchangeable with that of hard disk drives, enabling them to be deployed in place of actual hard disk drives.

A Negated AND, NO AND, or NAND is a logic function used in an electronic logic gate. NAND Flash uses floating-gate transistors that are connected in series and only when all inputs are equal to 1 (“pulled high”) will the output equal 0 (“pulled low”).

DTrace AnalyticsOracle’s DTrace Analytics software provides the indus-try’s only comprehensive and intuitive business analyt-ics environment for storage subsystems, with powerful real-time graphical analysis and monitoring utilities to help storage administrators:



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✓ Quickly and easily locate and manage hotspots and bottlenecks

✓ Proactively debug live storage and networking problems

✓ Understand how configuration and application changes affect the storage system

✓ Provision additional storage (DRAM, SSD, and hard disk) and perform capacity planning, without guesswork

Figure 2-3 shows a sample DTrace output screen, dem-onstrating the advantages of hybrid storage pool I/O acceleration.

.Figure 2-3: Hybrid storage pool I/O acceleration.



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In the example in Figure 2-3, a random I/O pattern is being written to the storage appliance. The top graph shows write latency, or how much time it takes to write data to DRAM, Flash, or disk. The bottom graph shows IOPS — an important measure of storage system performance.

With the hybrid storage pool turned off, all data is writ-ten to disk. From left to right, the graph depicts a top-down perspective of a disk as the drive head seeks back and forth looking for a space to write data. The farther it has to move to the inner part of the disk, the longer it takes — increasing write latency. Lower latency writes on the bottom of the display correlate to the outer edge of the disk drive, and higher latency writes toward the inner part of the disk drive correlate to the top of the display. IOPS are also extremely low due to the time it takes to write random data to the disk drive.

To the far right of the display in Figure 2-3, the hybrid storage pool is turned on — corresponding to a dra-matic drop in latency and increase in IOPS — as data is now written to Flash.

Oracle Solaris ZFSAdvanced file systems is yet another unified storage innovation that simplifies management while reducing errors. Oracle Solaris ZFS (Zettabyte File System) includes many key innovations, including

✓ Virtual storage pools. Unlike traditional file sys-tems that require a separate volume manager, Oracle Solaris ZFS integrates volume management functions. Rather than a typical one-to-one map-ping between the file system and its associated volumes, Oracle Solaris ZFS uses a storage pool model. Oracle Solaris ZFS decouples the file



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system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory, allowing for more efficient use of storage devices. Space is shared dynami-cally between multiple file systems from a single storage pool and is parceled out of the pool as file systems request it. Physical storage can be added to storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services. When capacity is no longer required by one file system in the pool, it becomes available to the other file systems.

✓ Data integrity. Oracle Solaris ZFS uses several techniques to keep on-disk data self-consistent and to eliminate silent data corruption, such as copy-on-write and end-to-end check summing. Copy-on-write means that data is written to a new block on the media before the pointers to the data are changed and the write is committed. In addi-tion, data is read and checked constantly to help ensure correctness, and any errors detected in a mirrored pool are automatically repaired to pro-tect against costly and time-consuming data loss and previously undetectable silent data corrup-tion. Corrections are facilitated by a RAID-Z imple-mentation that uses parity, striping, and atomic (“all or nothing”) operations to aid in the recon-struction of corrupted data.

Note: RAID-Z is Oracle’s proprietary implementation of disk redundancy, similar to RAID 5 — but with many enhancements that improve data protection and disk performance. In addition to RAID-Z, Oracle Solaris ZFS also supports RAID-Z2 with double parity and RAID-Z3 with triple parity for even higher levels of data protection and availability.



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✓ High performance. Oracle Solaris ZFS simplifies the code paths from the application to the hardware, delivering sustained throughput at near-platter speeds. Block allocation algorithms accelerate write operations and consolidate many small random writes into a single, more efficient sequential opera-tion. Indeed, an I/O scheduler bundles disk I/O to optimize arm movement and sector allocation to speed throughput. In addition, an intelligent prefetch performs read-ahead for sequential data streaming and can adapt its read behavior on the fly for more complex access patterns. Furthermore, data is striped automatically across all available storage devices to balance I/O and maximize throughput. Oracle Solaris ZFS immediately begins to allocate blocks from devices as soon as they are added to the storage pool, increasing effective bandwidth as each device is added to the system.

✓ Simplified administration. Oracle Solaris ZFS automates many administrative tasks to speed performance and eliminate common errors. Creating file systems is fast and easy. There is no need to configure or reconfigure underlying stor-age devices or volumes — these tasks are handled automatically when devices are added to a stor-age pool. In addition, administrators can guaran-tee a minimum capacity for file systems or set quotas to limit maximum sizes.

Unified Storage ComponentsMany unified storage vendors simply package block-based (SAN) functionality into an existing file-based (NAS) system. To deliver a truly innovative unified



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storage solution, Oracle couples standard components and open networks together with Oracle Solaris ZFS, enterprise Flash, and DTrace Analytics (providing in-depth monitoring of the complete storage system) into its Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.

The basic components of an Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance are a high-performance storage controller, storage expansion shelves, Oracle Solaris (including ZFS and DTrace Analytics), and an easy-to-use browser-based user interface (BUI) for set-up, monitoring, and management. Oracle’s Unified Storage also features a rich suite of integrated data services and storage man-agement software included at no extra cost. For full details, see Chapter 3.

The Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance family includes the following products:

✓ Sun ZFS Storage 7120. High-capacity storage at entry-level pricing.

• Up to 120TB raw capacity

• 24 GB DDR3 DRAM

• 96 GB Write Flash

✓ Sun ZFS Storage 7320. High-availability storage with flash-enabled hybrid storage pools.

• Optional cluster for high availability

• Up to 192TB raw capacity

• Up to 144GB DRAM

• Up to 4TB flash-enabled read-cache

• Up to 288GB flash-enabled write-cache



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✓ Sun ZFS Storage 7420. High performance, high capacity, high-availability unified storage.

• Up to 1.15PB (petabyte) raw capacity

• Up to 1TB DDR3 DRAM

• Up to 4TB flash-enabled read-cache

• Up to 1.7TB flash-enabled write-cache

✓ Sun ZFS Storage 7720. Industry leading density and simplicity. High-availability, high-density, rack-scale configuration.

• Up to 720GB raw capacity

• Up to 1TB DDR3 DRAM cache

• Up to 4TB flash-based read-cache

• Up to 432GB flash-based write-cache

Network connectivity options include

✓ Standard 4 x 1 Gb Ethernet ports

✓ Optional dual-port 10 Gb Ethernet (optical)

✓ Optional dual-port 1 Gb Ethernet (optical) or quad-port 1 Gb Ethernet (copper)

✓ Optional dual-port 40 Gb InfiniBand 4x QDR HCA

✓ Optional 4 or 8 Gb Fibre Channel HCA to connect Sun ZFS Storage Appliance as a block device to Fibre Channel SANs.



Chapter 3

What Are the Benefits of Oracle Unified Storage?

In This Chapter▶ Accelerating storage performance▶ Simplifying your storage infrastructure▶ Reducing storage costs

Unified storage solutions accelerate business per-formance and lower IT costs. With advanced ana-

lytics, simple data management, and breakthrough storage economics, Oracle unified storage solutions are the ideal storage platform for a wide range of applica-tions, including

✓ Web infrastructure and content management

✓ File services and infrastructure

✓ Virtualization and consolidation

✓ Cloud computing/storage

✓ Databases and Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

✓ Video streaming



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✓ Backup and data protection

✓ Business continuity and disaster recovery

✓ High Performance Technical Computing

In this chapter, we take a look at the business and tech-nical benefits of unified storage solutions available from Oracle.

Optimize PerformanceOracle unified storage can help organizations meet their growing performance needs while delivering dra-matic savings over traditional storage solutions.

Hybrid storage pools intelligently and automatically store and migrate data between DRAM, Flash, and disk, contin-uously optimizing performance and efficiency while transparently managing the entire platform as a single storage pool.

The business benefits go beyond performance and eco-nomics, to include improved user productivity and greater flexibility to address new business opportunities.

Because Oracle unified storage can enable greater throughput and greater availability for business appli-cations, it can help to improve user productivity. Applications can be scaled to new levels when storage bottlenecks are resolved. This can enable greater num-bers of users to be served with fast response times — even during peak usage periods.



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Case Study: Signature Styles reduces management complexity and costs

while boosting performance

Signature Styles is a leading marketer of women’s apparel and accessories, comprised of the Spiegel, Newport News, and Shapefx brands.

Requirement

Signature Styles needed an enterprise-class storage system to house the company’s critical customer data, as well as voluminous creative and advertising content for its mail order catalogs and Web sites.

Solution

Using the Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Applicance, Signature Styles was able to consolidate eight storage systems from six vendors into one unified storage system with a single, simple point of management.

Results

Here’s the outcome.

✓ Eliminated tape backups and implemented a cost effec-tive, robust disaster recovery solution that can recover files and customer data in seconds with the system’s replication and snapshot features.

(continued)



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✓ Reduced storage costs with built-in inline deduplication and compression capabilities leading to a 73 percent compression ratio on unstructured data.

✓ Delivered a 3x increase in performance while decreasing cooling requirements by 30 percent.

✓ Migrated 23 terabytes of data from legacy storage sys-tems to the new Oracle system in less than three days with no downtime and zero data corruption, using Oracle migration tools.

(continued)

Oracle unified storage also helps reduce complexity in the storage environment, thus lowering the risk of mis-takes that can lead to downtime and productivity loss.

With unified storage, it is now affordable and practical to build solutions with very high storage I/O throughput — solutions that may not have been practical using tradi-tional approaches. For example, an IDC survey of HPC users found that more than 90 percent of respondents were concerned about I/O in general and expected fur-ther I/O constraints in the coming years. The problem sets for HPC applications are large enough that there are always new ways to use more computing power when it becomes available and is affordable. Similarly, the scal-ability requirements for Web applications are constantly increasing. Web businesses can often increase revenue by supporting greater numbers of users, greater levels of user activity, or both.



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Simplify ManagementOracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides IT organi-zations with a flexible platform that can address various types of storage workloads while reducing management complexity and providing numerous benefits, including

✓ The ability to leverage industry-standard hard-ware to lower product costs while also including advanced technologies to boost performance and reliability.

✓ The flexibility to store file data with NAS proto-cols as well as block data through SAN protocols using iSCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, allowing storage administrators to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single storage platform.

✓ The inclusion of a number of advanced software features for provisioning, data protection, and system management that improve utilization rates and simplify management.

✓ Automatic real-time visualization of application and storage workloads with DTrace Analytics. DTrace helps storage administrators rapidly diag-nose and resolve issues (“how many IOPS?,” “what services are active?,” “what are the performance issues?”) and allows them to save, export, and replay analyses.

Reduce CostsReal cost savings can be realized with unified storage solutions using high-capacity disk drives and enter-prise Flash in hybrid storage pools, rather than large



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expensive arrays with traditional high-speed 15K RPM disk drives. High-capacity 7,200 RPM disk drives oper-ate on about half the power of 15K RPM disk drives and are generally less than one-tenth as expensive to acquire in cost per gigabyte (GB) than 15K RPM disk drives. Enterprise Flash, although more expensive to acquire, uses less than 1/100th of the power of 15K RPM disk drives, saving thousands of dollars annually in power costs in cases where Flash supplants hun-dreds or thousands of 15K RPM disk drives (see Figure 3-1).

Unified storage can also help reduce the ongoing cost of maintaining performance as user demand grows. By using high-capacity, low-RPM disk drives and enter-prise Flash, instead of partially populated 15K RPM disk drives, capital expense is lessened and complexity can also be greatly reduced. Application performance can be accelerated quickly and efficiently without having to buy more high-performance disk drives and without adding as many new devices (such as disk arrays and controllers) to the environment.

Because Oracle unified storage solutions with hybrid storage pools require significantly fewer disk drives — and have much lower power and cooling requirements, they can help businesses rapidly deploy new systems and applications without the need for a costly data center expansion. By replacing partially-filled 15K RPM disk drives with enterprise Flash and high-capacity disk drives, organizations can dramatically reduce the footprint of their storage infrastructure while simulta-neously increasing I/O throughput. The resulting reduc-tion in power requirements also enables organizations to stretch data center power resources farther.



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100 High Performance HDDs

Capacity: 30TBPerformance: 30K IOPS

Power: 1,750W

30 High Capacity HDDs

Capacity: 30TBPerformance: 40K IOPS

Power: 392W

1/3 the cost!2 SSDs

Hybrid Storage Pool

Figure 3-1: Breakthrough storage economics.



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Finally, Oracle delivers value to organizations by including all storage software in its Oracle ZFS storage appliances at no additional cost. See Figure 3-2 for a list of data protocols, data services, and data management software included in Oracle unified storage solutions.

Data Protocols

• Fibre Channel• iSCSI • Infiniband over IP/RDMA• iSER• SRP• NFS v3 and v4• CIFS• HTTP• WebDAV• FTP• NDMPv4

Data Management

• DTrace Analytics• Management Dashboard• Role-Based Access• NIS LDAP & AD Alerts• Phone Home• SNMP• Scripting• Dynamic Upgrades• Hardware/ component View• Advanced Networking• Workflow Automation• User-level Quotas• Support for Microsoft Management Console• System Configuration Backup/Restore• System Configuration Import/Export

Data Services

• Hybrid Storage Pool• RAID-Z DP (6)• Remote Replication• Mirroring and Triple Mirroring• Striping• Active-active Clustering• Antivirus• Snapshots (r/o, r/w, unlimited)• In-line Deduplication• Compression• Thin Provisioning• End-to-end Data Integrity• Multi-Path I/O• Fault Management• Microsoft VSS/ Shared Folders• Online Data Migration

Figure 3-2: Oracle storage software — at no additional cost.

Oracle Unified Storage is an industry-leading, cost-efficient solution for today’s storage challenges.

See Table 3-1 for a summary of Oracle unified storage capabilities and their associated benefits and results.



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Table 3-1 Oracle Unified Storage

Benefits and Results

Capability Benefit Result

Rich set of data services and network protocol support

Single vendor solution with high out-of-the-box functionality

Reduce costs by minimizing invest-ments in add-on software

Hybrid storage pools

Automates use of enterprise Flash technology with high capacity disk drives for optimum storage performance and efficiency

Reduce costs by combining high-performance flash, and high-capacity and low-cost stan-dard disks

Integrated browser inter-face storage management

Optimizes storage performance and utilization

Reduce costs with easy-to-use man-agement of stor-age devices and services

Integrated stor-age analytics

Understand and manage the perfor-mance of storage resources from the user, file, and system perspective

Accelerate busi-ness performance by getting the most out of your storage and application investments

(continued)



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Table 3-1 (continued)

Capability Benefit Result

ZFS file system with advanced error detection and self-healing capabilities

Eliminates silent data corruption, detects faults, and takes proactive action to eliminate their reoccurrence

Reduce risk with improved error detection and automated remediation; reduce costs with virtually unlimited file system expandability

Built-in, in-line deduplication combined with ZFS compression

Reduces storage consumption as data is written (in-line) without extra overhead; multi-plicative space savings with 4 types of integrated compression

Significant cost and space savings with file-based data in storage consolidation, virtualization, and other data-intensive environments

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Integration

Enables an inte-grated Oracle Database to Sun ZFS Storage Appliance view and provides monitoring of multiple storage systems from a single pane

Eases manage-ment of multiple Sun ZFS Storage Appliance systems in Oracle Database environments incl. provisioning of add’l capacity and different SLA levels



Chapter 4

Deploying Oracle Unified Storage

In This Chapter▶ Getting started on the right track▶ Moving your data▶ Maintaining and administering your unified storage

solution

Deploying a unified storage solution can seem over-whelming, particularly for an organization that is

replacing disparate legacy storage systems and migrat-ing terabytes (or more) of business-critical data.

This chapter explains how Oracle makes it easy to deploy its Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with professional services that can help mitigate the risk of downtime, data loss, and costly delays.

Oracle’s award-winning support and profes-sional and managed services can help reduce costs and speed time to market, while optimiz-ing datacenter power, space, and cooling.



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InstallationInstalling and configuring a unified storage solution is a relatively simple step in the deployment process. For example, Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances are shipped with software preinstalled from the factory. Each system is configured for easy out-of-the-box setup in as little as four minutes. An installation wizard takes the guesswork out of tuning the system, and even clus-ter scenarios are easy to configure and deploy.

Installing an Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance involves the following six steps.

1. Installing the hardware and configuring the pri-mary network interface through the serial port. Once the hardware is rack-mounted and cabled, connect to the appliance through the serial port and assign an IP address to the management interface.

2. Starting the browser interface. A secure browser interface based on Ajax is included. Supported browsers include Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera, and Safari.

3. Configuring networking (including name ser-vices and the system clock). Supported name ser-vices include DNS (domain name service) and NIS (network information service). The date/time can be configured to use NTP (network time protocol) or to be manually updated.

4. Optionally configuring one or more directory services. Supported directory services include Active Directory, LDAP (Lightweight Directory



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Access Protocol, such as Oracle Internet Directory), and NIS.

5. Configuring storage pools. Allocate drive space to hybrid storage pools and assign them to servers.

6. Configuring NAS features. These include reliabil-ity, availability, and serviceability (RAS), alarms and threshold alerts, phone home, and more.

Oracle Advanced Installation service for Sun ZFS Storage Appliance goes beyond basic installation to include configuration into an operational storage envi-ronment, configuration with directory services, and setup of failover configuration. Oracle provides the installation assistance and expertise required to achieve a smooth, successful startup and to ensure that systems are running at an optimal level right from the start.

Data MigrationMoving production data from legacy systems to a new unified storage platform (or any new storage platform, for that matter) is easily the most time-consuming and risky phase in the deployment process.

Online data migration is a process for migrating data from external sources with the intent of replacing or decommissioning the original equipment, once the data migration is complete.

Online data migration functionality on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is known as shadow migration and is integrated into the appliance. When shares are created



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on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, they can optionally “shadow” an existing directory, either locally or over NFS (Network File System). A share is then created on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with the shadow prop-erty set, and clients are updated to point to the new share and can then access the appliance in read/write mode.

Once the shadow property is set, data is transparently migrated in the background from the source appliance to the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance. If a client requests a file that has not yet been migrated, the appliance will automatically migrate that file before responding to the request (see Figure 4-1).

/export/ens

Source

Sun ZFSStorage Appliance

Clients

/export/home/ens

new

read-only NFS

read-write

migrated unmigrated

Figure 4-1: Shadow migration automatically migrates data on demand.



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This process may temporarily incur some initial latency for some client requests, but once a file has been migrated, all accesses are local to the appliance and enjoy native performance.

Shadow migration is implemented with on-disk data within the file system, so there is no external database and no data stored locally outside the storage pool. If a pool is failed over in a cluster or both system disks fail and a new head node is required, all data necessary to continue shadow migration without interruption will be kept with the storage pool.

Oracle’s Unified Storage Data Migration ser-vice minimizes disruption and allows you to gain full-featured functionality when migrating from other platforms. Customers can achieve faster ROI by leveraging Oracle’s deep techni-cal expertise and proven implementation and migration tools.

ServiceBecause data storage is such an essential component of IT infrastructure, you need a comprehensive and flexible service offering from your storage vendor.

Oracle’s services portfolio helps organizations seam-lessly integrate their next-generation unified storage solution into their storage environment and optimize its use. Oracle offers a full spectrum of services to help organizations along the path to open storage.

Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is covered under a single service contract. The unified service plan can help sim-plify and reduce the cost of managing an IT infrastruc-ture while delivering greater ROI.



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Oracle also offers automated services for remotely monitoring and managing storage systems. These remote services are designed to help customers increase service availability, reduce administration time, maintain storage system performance, and manage datacenter environments more efficiently.

AdministrationBecause the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance series provides a fast, efficient Web-based storage administration environ-ment, no specialized training is needed for installation, configuration, and day-to-day administration. And, since you can use the Grid Control plug-in to monitor the appliances from the Oracle 11g Enterprise Manager envi-ronment, you can have an integrated view of your entire operational environment — from application to disk.

Extremely simple-to-use graphical tools and detailed analytics software are provided, enabling intelligent analysis and optimization of the storage system. The software provides real-time visibility into the CPU, memory, data, data protocol, disk, and network performance.

Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Administration courses are also available to help storage administrators gain a deep knowledge of Sun ZFS Storage Appliance through knowledge transfer that will allow staff to be more productive.

You can “test drive” a virtual Sun ZFS Storage Appliance on your laptop or desktop PC by downloading the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Simulator. Go to www.oracle.com/goto/sunsimulatorlp.



Chapter 5

Ten (Okay, Five) Things to Look For in a

Unified Storage Solution

In This Chapter▶ Getting the most out of a unified storage solution!

Unified storage helps organizations optimize sys-tems and storage performance, reduce costs,

improve manageability, maintain data integrity, and increase efficiency. Demand the innovative features described in this chapter for your unified storage solu-tion, to deliver these benefits to your organization!

Flash TechnologyEnterprise Flash technology provides numerous bene-fits including

✓ Performance. Flash technology performance is measured in microseconds and tens of thousands of IOPS (Input/Output operations per second) compared to milliseconds and hundreds of IOPS for hard disk drives.



42

✓ Low power consumption. Enterprise Flash uses only 5 percent of the power used by hard disk drives when idle and as little as 15 percent when performing read/write operations.

✓ Cost. Although cost per gigabyte is higher for enterprise Flash than traditional hard disk drives, lower power consumption, higher performance, and greater reliability drive the cost of enterprise Flash down to $0.02/IOPS compared to $1.25/IOPS for hard disk drives.

✓ Reliability. Enterprise Flash contains no moving parts — data is stored on integrated circuits that can withstand significant shock and vibration.

Hybrid Storage PoolsHybrid storage pools allow unified storage solutions to take full advantage of inexpensive hard disk drive capacity and the performance of enterprise-class SSDs.

Hybrid storage pools can consist of:

✓ High capacity 7.2K RPM SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disk drives (significantly lower cost per GB)

✓ Enterprise Flash (extremely fast, but higher cost per GB and lower capacity)

✓ Automated movement of blocks of data between memory, Flash, and disk drives to optimize performance



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Intelligent Management SoftwareA unified storage solution should provide a compre-hensive integrated set of advanced management solu-tions that include system set-up and administration, storage analytics and troubleshooting, and a rich set of data services to maximize performance, flexibility, and administrator productivity. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance series includes powerful yet easy-to-use Web-based storage management, hybrid storage pools, and a complete set of data services for virtualization, database consolidation, file sharing, replication, and business continuity/disaster recovery. See Chapter 2 to learn more.

Analytics CapabilitiesDetailed real-time analytics software, such as Oracle’s DTrace Analytics, allows administrators to quickly identify and diagnose system performance issues, per-form capacity planning, and debug live storage and networking problems before they adversely impact the entire network. Real-time analysis and monitoring functionality provides in-depth analysis of key storage subsystems, helping administrators quickly identify the source of performance bottlenecks. Check out Chapter 2 for details.



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In-Line Deduplication with CompressionDeduplication and compression technology reduces the amount of disk space used and the amount of data transferred, thereby increasing effective throughput.

With Oracle Solaris ZFS, users report a huge win for storing unstructured data across a wide variety of applications. A 50 percent space reduction in their use of primary storage (or 2X compression) is typical. Also, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance’s abundant processing resources enable faster reads and writes of com-pressed data due to reduced channel I/O.

Once data is compressed, deduplication eliminates redundant, or duplicate, data on a file system. Duplicate data is identified at the block-level rather than the file-level, thus a small block of matching bit patterns in sev-eral different files can actually represent the same data on the storage system.

Built-in, in-line deduplication in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance allows data to be deduplicated as it is cre-ated. On other systems, deduplication is run as a scheduled post-process, at night for example. Oracle Solaris ZFS also uses a large 256-bit checksum to ensure the right data is delivered to the right user at the right time. This highly accurate checksum is also used to facilitate more efficient block-level deduplica-tion as the data is created. Finally, Oracle Solaris ZFS can perform deduplication across much larger storage pools — up to 1.15PB on current systems, compared to 16TB on other vendor systems.



Open the book and find:

• How to meet growing storage needs

• Ways to lower TCO with unified storage

• The benefits of maxi-mizing performance with flash technology

• How to reduce storage complexity in your data center

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, visit oracle.com.

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for videos, step-by-step examples, how-to articles, or to shop!

Web-based applications, storage consolidation, virtualized environments, social networking, regulatory compliance, and high-performance computing applications are driving an explosive demand for more storage. Unified storage is an innovative, cost-effective, and scalable solution to the data storage challenge!

• Understand the data storage challenge — maximize per formance and capacity while minimizing cost and complexity

• Discover unified storage technology — deep dive into flash technology, hybrid storage pools, ZFS, and more

• Deploy a storage solution — plan the successful installation, migration, service, and administration of your unified storage solution

Conquering the data storage challenge with unified storage

Lawrence C. Miller, CISSP

• Maximize storage capacity

• Improve storage performance with hybrid storage pools

• Simplify storage management

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