March 2017, IDC #US42415617

MARKET NOTE

Oracle Aligns ZFS Storage Appliance with Disruptive Datacenter Initiatives

Laura DuBois Ritu Jyoti Amita Potnis

EXECUTIVE SNAPSHOT

FIGURE 1

Executive Snapshot: Oracle ZFS Converged Cloud Storage

Source: IDC, 2017

This IDC Market Note includes details from Oracle’s March 29, 2017, announcement of Oracle ZFS Converged Cloud Storage. Oracle briefed IDC analysts on the latest enhancements to its ZFS Storage Appliance, which converges its high-performance storage appliances with its public cloud services. This document provides our analysis of Oracle’s current position in the NAS and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market and how this announcement aids future opportunities.

Key Takeaways• Oracle is the first public cloud provider to converge its high-performance storage appliances with its

public cloud services enabling a single consistent object storage model between on-premises and the public cloud and brings cloud operational economics to the datacenter with ZFS’ Right-To-Use model.

• Integration of flash pools in the ZFS storage appliance will drive improved performance for traditional workloads, expand deployments to big data workloads, and drive overall reduction in costs in power, cooling, and floor space.

• The new Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP) 2.0 dynamic tuning based on hints the Oracle Database embeds in each and every I/O will fuel a significant admin productivity boost, support predictable performance in consolidated workloads, and speed up RMAN backups considerably.

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IN THIS MARKET NOTE

This IDC Market Note includes details from Oracle's March 29, 2017, announcement of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance enhancements and integration with the Oracle Public Cloud. These include all firmware updates to support all-flash configurations, expansion of ZFS capacity to Oracle Storage Cloud, and Oracle database automation with OISP 2.0.

IDC'S POINT OF VIEW

The storage industry faces disruption from four key technologies: flash, convergence, cloud computing, and software-defined storage. Enabled by ongoing price-per-gigabyte declines out to 2020, flash memory is replacing 15K RPM and 7.2K RPM HDDs as the persistent media of choice across a range of workloads and use cases. Compute, storage, and networking are being consolidated into single solutions in the form of converged and hyperconverged systems to increase efficiency and reduce cost. The rise of public cloud computing requires on-premises suppliers to develop hybrid strategies if they are to survive. Increasingly, this includes strategies for extending on-premises infrastructure services to the public cloud. Last, driven by capex reductions, automation, and mitigating vendor lock-in, software-defined storage will continue to eat away at proprietary hardware designs over the next decade. IDC believes that a combination of all or some of these new technologies will improve ease of management and enhance analytics of ever-growing data sets regardless of where the data is stored.

It is exactly these disruptive forces that Oracle is embracing with its latest release of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance. The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, powered by the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and volume manager, first started shipping in 2008 prior to the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Now in its fifth generation, the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance has continued to gain market traction in the NAS market segment. In the 4Q16 period, IDC's Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker showed Oracle's ZFS Storage Appliance achieving 6.0% revenue growth year over year in 2016, well outperforming the overall NAS market that declined at 8.1% during the same period. According to Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast, 2016-2020 (IDC #US41685816, September 2016), capacity deployed in scale-out file- and object-based storage (FOBS) infrastructure will reach 364EB, growing at a CAGR of 30.1% from 2016 to 2020. Much of this capacity is in the public cloud and drives a large portion of revenue in this segment ($20.6 billion in 2020). Oracle's latest announcements related to converged cloud, all-flash NAS, and dynamic database automation are timely in an age where object storage vendors are bringing all-flash object appliances and features such as data management across storage locations.

Unlike other IT technology leaders, Oracle is unique in enabling private clouds while also offering native public cloud services. In 2015, Oracle launched its first infrastructure-as-a-service offering and quickly became one of the top providers worldwide. Today, Oracle offers six public cloud storage services spanning block, object, and file services and backup, archive, and primary storage use cases. Further, across all forms of Oracle's public cloud services, from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to software as a service (SaaS), Oracle supports over 70 million users across 4,000 customer environments.

Overall, IDC believes these enhancements will help Oracle secure a sustainable position in the new era of storage and next-generation workloads.

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Oracle's announcement on ZFS Cloud Converged Storage includes the following highlights:

• Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance support for all-flash NAS and all-flash SAN configurations. For customers already using ZFS, it accelerates performance with sub-millisecond latencies with 480,000 read/write IOPs. All-flash configurations not only offer performance gains but also power, cooling, and floor space reductions. IDC sees the use of flash extending beyond block-based workloads to also serve file and object use cases; in particular, those needing high bandwidth. Thus Oracle is capitalizing on this big data flash opportunity for file-based workloads and backup, archive, and disaster recovery use cases.

• Integration of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance capacity with Oracle Public Cloud under the moniker ZFS Cloud Converged Storage. Oracle has embedded a native object gateway into the ZFS appliance to allow on-premises file storage to be extended or migrated to Oracle cloud storage. Data within ZFS cloud pools can be stored as objects within Oracle's Public Cloud object storage service. This allows hot data to stay in DRAM or flash on-premises and colder data to be moved to object storage off-premises. This native object gateway integrated with the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance also has an economic advantage for customers. There isn't an additional charge for the cloud access license, unlike the charges associated with the usage of cloud gateways from other incumbents or start-ups. Overall, it simplifies data mobility and excludes the management overhead of an additional piece of hardware/software.

• Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance support for Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol 2.0. For several years, Oracle has tightly integrated database functions with its storage arrays via an Oracle-specific protocol. OISP is a file storage protocol that operates between Oracle 12c and ZFS Storage to optimize and tune data placement. The Oracle Database sends hints to the array based on database file types and I/O patterns. Now with OISP 2.0 database, I/O can be prioritized based on automatic database hinting. The benefit is in dynamically tuning storage to optimize performance. Increasingly, advanced data placement techniques as well as sophisticated quality of service, write minimization, and garbage collection processes are essential to support highly virtualized workloads.

LEARN MORE

Related Research IDC's Worldwide Software-Defined Storage Taxonomy, 2017 (IDC #US42258917, January

2017)

Understanding End-User Object-Based Storage Adoption and Trends (IDC #US41998216, December 2016)

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2016 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US41918416, December 2016)

Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Market Update, 3Q16 (IDC #US42066216, December 2016)

Software-Defined Storage Appearing in Production Deployments Across Organizations of All Types and Sizes (IDC #US41655116, September 2016)

Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast, 2016–2020 (IDC #US41685816, September 2016)

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Synopsis This IDC Market Note includes details from Oracle's March 29, 2017, announcement of Oracle ZFS Converged Cloud Storage.

"This announcement comes at a time of increased competition and growth within the IaaS market," said Ritu Jyoti, research director, Storage, at IDC. "Cloud convergence, extreme performance, and dynamic database automation are the trifecta of innovations required for next-generation workloads and are increasingly needed to compete in the next phase of IaaS growth."

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