Oracle’s latest ZFS Storage Appliances, the ZS3 Series, enable customers to significantly improve operational efficiencies, reduce data centre costs, and increase business application performance.
Powered by an advanced cache architecture and multi-threaded SMP OS, the ZS3 Series has achieved the highest throughput, the lowest latency, and better price/performance when compared to similar NetApp, EMC, IBM, and HP systems.

Oracle’s new ZS3 Series storage enables customers to accelerate time to insight, mitigate risk and reduce data centre costs through high performance, dynamic automation and extensive Oracle co-engineering.

With new world record performance, Oracle’s ZS3 Series storage enables customers to perform critical business functions faster, including optimising supply chains, closing quarterly books, evaluating a greater number of investment scenarios, and accelerating database queries. It also enables enterprises to respond to application needs dynamically while helping to reduce time-to-business value.

To simplify Oracle Database deployments, increase database performance and reduce storage requirements, the ZS3 Series takes advantage of Oracle-only storage features and capabilities:
* The new Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP) automates Oracle Database tuning and administration. Through OISP, Oracle Database 12c communicates metadata to the Oracle ZS3 storage which can automate tuning, reducing manual processes by 65%, while optimising database performance and eliminating human error. As a result, customers can do more with the same headcount and deliver strategic projects faster.

* New Heat Map and Automatic Data Optimisation (ADO) capabilities of Oracle Database 12c apply different compression levels through the data lifecycle to deliver consistently high database performance and reduced storage capacity.

* Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) compresses Oracle Database data by 10-50x, significantly reducing the amount of storage and bandwidth required, leading to considerable savings through storage cost avoidance, including data centre infrastructure, cooling, switches, conduit, cables, racks, floor space, and maintenance.

The ZS3’s SMP Operating System fully leverages a next generation architecture, massive cache and multi-core processors to provide users with over 32 GB/s of sustained bandwidth within a single system. This enables ZS3 to support thousands of VMs per system, easily handling extremely highly threaded I/O which saturates conventional NAS filers, leading to filer sprawl.

ZS3 is the only storage system with realtime, dynamic application-aware performance and health analytics, enabling customers to visualise CPU, cache, protocol, disk, memory, networking and system-related data – all at the same time.

An independent study showed that DTrace Storage Analytics, a standard feature of Oracle ZFS storage appliances, enables customers to troubleshoot 44% faster with 38% less complexity than NetApp FAS3270, resulting in estimated savings in admin costs up to $27,000 per system per year.

The ZS3 Series features an enhanced Hybrid Storage Pools cache design delivering a four times increase in space efficiency for better caching of critical data and write performance enhancements that deliver a consistent low-latency response time.

The ZS3 Hybrid Storage Pools architecture has been flash optimised and multi-core enabled since 2008 and the latest iteration delivers twice the improvement in overall response time over the prior generation.

With ZS3’s intelligent caching algorithms, up to 70% of all I/O is served from DRAM – up to 2Tb per system – which is one thousand times faster than flash drives and 10 000 times faster than hard disk drives, accelerating queries and time to insight. Oracle will discuss the new ZS3 storage systems in a Webcast.

“Oracle’s ability to deliver Application Engineered Storage is a major differentiator which enables customers to maximise performance, efficiency and productivity at significantly lower cost than the competition,” says Scott Tracy, VP, software development, Oracle.
“Oracle’s new ZS3 storage appliances demonstrate the raw power and value that hardware and software engineered systems can provide.”