From the days of thinking a petabyte of storage was unattainable and unnecessary to the present when a petabyte is scarcely enough, follow along with Marc Hamilton whose blog on the subject leads readers, finally, to what he recommends as the solution: Oracle Sun Unified Storage.

Hamilton notes the requirements that eat up the capacity in a petabyte's worth of disk drives: "Disk formatting and RAID partitioning can use up to 50% of your storage," Hamilton writes, "and user quotas meant to ensure a single user doesn't use up all of your storage downloading high definition video files can leave valuable unused storage inaccessible when you need it," he continues.

The capacity to be found in the range of arrays from the Sun Storage 7110 to the Sun Storage 7410 (up to 576 TB in the latter) is augmented by the ability of Oracle's unified storage offerings to deliver more storage than their rated raw capacity.

How is this possible? Hamilton explains that the data compression capability to be found in the ZFS file system. Hamilton cites the verdict of Don MacAskil of SmugMug on the virtues of ZFS: "ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across." Hamilton adds that while ZFS data compression saves storage space it can also speed up an application like MySQL.

In addition to data compression, Hamilton points out, features such as data deduplication and resource allocation -- available at no extra cost in Oracle Unified Storage -- set it apart as a management tool.

Among the most useful capabilities of Oracle Unified Storage is the solution's ability to list available storage capacity in terms, not of simple, inflexible quotas, but of actual capacity available, reflecting instances of file deletion which make capacity available to users. This system of so-called "lightweight quotas" allocates space to users only when they require it.

Says Hamilton in summation, "The combination of data compression, data deduplication, and lightweight quotas all help you stretch more value out of a petabyte of data. Of course, those are only some of the ways that Oracle's unified storage helps you simplify your storage."

More Information

Sun Storage and Tape

Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System

Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System

Oracle Solaris ZFS

Guidelines for Optimizing the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems for Oracle Databases [...read more...]

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