Optimizing Storage for Better TCO in Oracle Environments INFOSTOR Executive Brief a QuinStreet Excutive Brief. 2012
To the casual observer, and even to business decision makers who don t work in information technology, there are two general trends when it comes to data storage today: 1) businesses need more of it, because the amount of electronic data they have to store is growing exponentially; and 2) the cost of storage capacity keeps falling, which means businesses can avoid being crushed by the costs to store all of this data. These observations are true, but businesses that see storage as a commodity and make purchasing decisions based solely on price per terabyte run the risk of creating a storage infrastructure that is difficult to manage, inefficient and lacks performance and the ability to scale. As a result, storage infrastructures are increasingly complicated, with different storage tiers to support differing types of data and unique, purpose-designed products to support different applications. Rote implementation of such a strategy often leads to higher overall long-term costs. Purchasing decisions need to take this into account. Businesses that are running Oracle software, whether it s databases, middleware or applications like E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM or Agile PLM, will find that Oracle storage products will help them achieve a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) because of the seamless integration built into Oracle products and the built-in support for tiered storage, which puts data on the right kind of storage at the right price. Storage is a perfect example of Oracle s latest slogan, Hardware and software, engineered to work together. This paper is going to examine the management advantages of using Oracle storage with Oracle software. Other papers in this series examine performance and scalability, and efficiency. It s also worth noting that Oracle s storage portfolio consists of a number of best-of-breed products and solutions that can help businesses build an IT infrastructure to manage data at all points in the data lifecycle, from inception to long-term archiving, with support for the most demanding database and online transaction applications. Businesses that are not using Oracle applications would do well to read on and learn about the management features in the Oracle storage portfolio and consider Oracle s products for their storage needs. The Oracle Storage Portfolio The Oracle storage portfolio consists of products that meet all of today s storage needs. Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are purpose-built to simplify and accelerate database workloads. The Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is optimized for network attached storage (NAS) I/O. The Oracle Pillar Axiom storage system excels at storage area network (SAN) block I/O. Oracle StorageTek tape storage helps businesses save 1
on long-term archiving and provides a safety net for backup. Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are the storage technology behind the exceptional database performance offered by the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and SPARC SuperCluster. They are highly optimized for use with Oracle Database 11g, and deliver incredible I/O performance for online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing applications thanks to their ability to offload database functionality into the storage server, efficiently compress data, leverage embedded Exadata Smart Flash Cache and their massively parallel architecture that uses multiple 40 Gbps Infiniband links to create a high-performance storage grid. Exadata storage is easy to use and manage and delivers mission-critical availability, reliability and exceptional performance to the enterprise. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is primarily targeted at businesses that have deployed or are transitioning to NAS for their enterprise applications, but it can also help businesses manage data for virtualized server and cloud environments. It can play a big part in storage consolidation projects and provides data protection with backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Oracle created Sun ZFS Storage Appliance solutions aimed at certain industries and applications, such as Backup and Recovery for Oracle Exadata, Server Virtualization, Accelerating Database Test and Development, Data Protection for Microsoft Windows Environments and more. Oracle s Pillar Axiom SAN storage systems provide application-aware storage. Rather than using the firstin, first-out (FIFO) approach to I/O, Oracle Pillar systems use integrated, dynamic I/O priority management to optimize the Axiom to the business value of the application environment. Prioritizing I/O requests based on the business requirements means that data from a mission-critical application will not get stuck behind data from a less-critical system such as the employee time-off request application. It also means that applications that are not missioncritical will not be starved for I/O by the higher priority applications. The Pillar Axiom manages how much of various critical system resources are devoted to multiple applications of differing priorities so they can all meet their I/O needs while running on the same storage system. With Pillar Axiom, customers can confidently consolidate their SAN storage and achieve performance, efficiency and management benefits. Oracle Pillar Axiom systems consist of a modular storage platform that can help businesses consolidate their storage resources and provide non-disruptive scale. They also allow users to create multiple virtual storage systems within the same storage pool, allowing the data from different applications to be isolated in accordance with security or compliance restrictions. Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Pillar Axiom products are also the only products to support Oracle s innovative data reduction technology called Hybrid Columnar Compression, which is a feature of Oracle Database 11g R2 Enterprise Edition. With Hybrid Columnar Compression, read-only or write-seldom databases or database partitions found in data Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are the storage technology behind the exceptional database performance offered by the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and SPARC SuperCluster 2
warehouses and in-database archives to be compressed between 10x and 50x, achieving 3x to 5x greater benefits than are possible using standard compression techniques on non-oracle storage. By using Hybrid Columnar Compression, businesses can reduce the amount of storage they need to purchase and manage reducing both capital and operational expenses. Most of the world s information is stored on tape. This has been true for years, and it will continue to be the case well into the future. Oracle s StorageTek tape products are backed by more than 40 years of experience in tape storage and tape libraries. The StorageTek line of products offers the world s highest-capacity drives with the performance and scalability needed to reduce backup windows and keep TCO in check. Oracle tape also includes unique high-availability features, such as hot-replaceable robotics and the ability to expand existing libraries and add more tape drives while operating. Oracle also offers encryption and compliance features to keep the data stored on tape secure. All 10 of the world s 10 largest banks rely on tape storage from Oracle. The same can be said for each of the 10 largest telcos in the world. In addition, many of the world s largest archives and leading Internet providers rely on Oracle s tape solutions to meet their long-term storage needs. Easier Management with Oracle Storage The Oracle storage portfolio is full of features that make it easier for IT professionals to manage their storage infrastructure, especially when they re using Oracle storage with Oracle applications. When the storage infrastructure is easy to manage and simple tasks are automated, the IT staff can devote more of its time to the products and services that directly benefit the organization s bottom line. Among the features in Sun ZFS Storage Appliances that make them easier for administrators to manage are DTrace analytics, Hybrid Storage Pools and integration with other Oracle software platforms, such as Oracle VM, Oracle VDI and Oracle Enterprise Manager. DTrace analytics give storage administrators an unprecedented level of observability into the inner workings of their storage environment. By utilizing thousands of probes to instrument all components of the solution, from client to file to disk drive, DTrace allows administrators to quickly isolate and discover the root cause of performance issues. Combined with its extremely intuitive interface that enables visual drilldowns into real-time and historical data, DTrace analytics enables dramatically faster time to problem resolution, much higher application availability and performance with a fraction of the system administration time used by typical NAS solutions. In fact, the Edison Group has estimated that each Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is 44 percent faster to troubleshoot and 36 percent easier to manage than NetApp filers. Hybrid Storage Pools not only optimize Sun ZFS Storage Appliance 3
performance and efficiency, but also simplify system management due to their deeply automated design. Hybrid Storage Pools seamlessly manage memory, read and write-optimized flash, performance disk and capacity disk. By automatically recognizing different I/O patterns, the Hybrid Storage Pools make the decision to place data on the storage media that delivers the best performance. The application deals with the ZFS file system as if it s managing a single, integrated pool of disk eliminating the need for continuous tuning by storage administrators. Oracle Pillar Axiom systems for SAN block I/O are an ideal platform for storage consolidation, which in itself makes managing a storage infrastructure easier for administrators. But the Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities built in to the Pillar Axiom storage controllers and the ability to dynamically manage workloads to specific, user-defined service levels save administrators from manual fine-tuning. By allowing storage administrators to define the level of service that an application requires, QoS ensures that business-critical applications are given priority when it comes to storage resources even when other applications are using the same storage pool. Administrators are no longer required to add capacity or rip out an old system and replace it with a new one when performance is suffering. The Pillar Axiom QoS manager is a powerful system that delivers finegrain control over multiple aspects of the system to ensure applications can perform to the level of their business requirements. It enables the dynamic policy-based allocation of multi-queued I/O priority, CPU, cache and capacity. It can also automatically configure disk striping levels, mirroring, I/O priority queues, network bandwidth and caching algorithms. Oracle is also making tape much easier to manage as part of an enterprise s global storage infrastructure. In a tiered-storage environment, Sun Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software automates the movement of data to the least expensive tier of media possible while still meeting or exceeding file retrieval performance requirements. Automated data movement across all tiers of storage including tape is an essential practice for companies storing large amounts of data for extended retention periods. SAM virtualizes underlying disk and tape storage to make it a seamless experience for application integration and to dramatically simplify storage administration. SAM unleashed the well understood raw cost benefits of tape media by allowing customers to leverage tape as an active tier of storage for primary file data based on user-defined settings for which data should reside on tape and when. By writing up to four local and remote copies of the file across disk and/ or tape, SAM also offers a built-in platform for data protection. Features that make hardware and software easier to manage go beyond the Oracle storage portfolio and permeate the entire Oracle stack and its interactions with Oracle storage. Oracle Enterprise Manager simplifies the management of complex IT systems in physical, virtual and cloud environments, thanks to its comprehensive, centralized and builtin management capabilities. It also provides system health monitoring and performance views for all hardware and software components. Oracle Pillar Axiom systems for SAN block I/O are an ideal platform for storage consolidation, which in itself makes managing a storage infrastructure easier for administrators. 4
Oracle Key Manager (OKM) provides a comprehensive and highly secure key management platform for creating, storing, distributing and managing keys used by Oracle encrypting tape drives as well as the Oracle database. OKM simplifies key management because it automatically creates, provisions and deletes encryption keys in accordance with user and system policies. Administrators create policies used to manage the encryption keys using a secure client UI. With many of today s applications being deployed into virtual environments, it s important that Oracle s virtualization software, Oracle VM, be able to efficiently manage storage resources. The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework enables Oracle VM Manager to leverage the resources and functionality of storage systems in an Oracle VM environment. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and Pillar Axiom utilize Oracle VM Storage Connect to simplify management of NAS and SAN storage in a virtual server environment. Organizations using storage vendors other than Oracle that have enabled the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in can use the plug-in to provision their storage through the Oracle VM Manager, further simplifying storage management. Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN), the preferred method for efficient backup and recovery of Oracle databases, provides blocklevel corruption detection during backup and restore. It optimizes performance and space consumption during backup with file multiplexing and backup set compression, and it is engineered to work uniquely well with Oracle s NAS and SAN storage. Because RMAN is built in to the Oracle database, administrators don t have to worry about installation, deployment and licensing. Focus on Management: Oracle Storage in Oracle Database Environments In a perfect world, databases would be able to keep their working set of data in memory, which would lead to faster performance for mission-critical applications and time-sensitive transactions. Thanks to the size of most data sets, the cost of main memory and the volatile nature of memory should a power outage occur, this normally isn t possible. Production database environments require disk storage as their permanent storage repository, which can increase I/O latency and lower application performance if an optimized architecture is not utilized. One way that Oracle optimizes solution architectures is by using Flash storage, which can be used as primary storage or as a fast cache managed by the Oracle Database. In the Exadata Storage Servers found in Oracle Exadata and SPARC SuperCluster systems, the Exadata Smart Flash Cache holds up to 384GB of data (which can be further increased with compression) in each server. Flash provides access latencies that are 20x lower than those of hard disk drives and I/O rates that are up to 50x higher, and the tight integration of these capabilities into the Exadata Storage Server provides a key performance differentiator. 5
Flash can also be used in non- Exadata or SPARC SuperCluster systems either as a cache or as primary storage for critical files. Oracle s Sun Storage F5100 enterprise flash array can be used to hold index files or critical data tables where it provides more than 1 million I/O operations per second the equivalent of more than 3,000 hard disk drives. Oracle s Flash technologies simplify management by reducing the number of devices administrators have to manage and by automating much of that management through the use of Smart Flash Cache or Exadata Smart Flash Cache capabilities. Conclusion The Oracle storage portfolio contains a number of features that make storage management easier on administrators and improve the TCO for organizations using Oracle storage to support Oracle software applications. With products that meet the storage needs of organizations across database, SAN, NAS and tape storage, Oracle delivers storage systems that are engineered to seamlessly integrate with Oracle applications and other components in the Oracle stack. Features that simplify management can also benefit organizations looking for best-ofbreed storage solutions for non- Oracle applications. Be sure to download the other parts of this series of Executive Briefs to learn about the performance and scalability and efficiency advantages of using Oracle storage with Oracle software. 6