Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances – OS 8.7

A new version for your ZFS storage appliances is here; OS 8.7 with some new and nice features and a new hardware configuration as an all flash array…

Oracle Support Document 2021771.1 (Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance: Software Updates) can be found at:
https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2021771.1

Some of my favourites:

OISP 2.0

The big advantages running your Oracle Database on Oracle Storage when using Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol bring new capabilities that increase Oracle Database performance. It prioritizes IOs based on database hints, effectively increases online transaction processing using different cache and IO settings on your ZFSSA, all without special configurations and without database or storage administrator intervention. New Analytic functions for OISP bytes and operations. Statistics can be broken down by client, filename, database name, database filetype, database function, share, and project, latency, size, and offset. In a multi-tenant environment you will be able to find problems within some clicks, that’s very cool.

Data Deduplication v2

In the past it was not a good idea to enable deduplication if you were not really using it, had less files dedup’able or being dedicated as a dedup destination because you needed a lot of memory for your dedup matrix… with this release you get a designate SSD meta cache device(s) for to hold your deduplication metadata tables as well as other metadata. In addition you can enable deduplicated replication.

New Protocols

We have now SMB 3.0 which enables transparent failover and multichannel. We got NFS 4.1 and have the HTTP Object Store to save data as storage objects through the Swift Object Store protocol.

Replication

A bunch of new features like resumable replication, no more need to uncompress/compress raw disk blocks on send, auto snapshot management and schedule configuration, lag alerts and increased number of simultaneous streams.

Cloud?

Oracle announced the new firmware as “the cloud storage” and says you can use your Oracle Storage Cloud subscription as backend storage and your local I/O is on your flash drives (read/write-zillas). I read the documentation, the online wiki and clicked on every button on the GUI but I could not find anything about that feature… the only thing in the release notes is a marked bug being solved called “want zfs pools based on cloud storage devices” but I have no clue how to configure that. Perhaps Oracle marketing guys know more than their engineers. 🙂

But the features sounds very nice and I really want to test it how that could perform…