ZFS Storage Appliance Year in Review

Happy New Year!

Now is the time to reflect on the past year and to thank everyone who helps make our product successful.

This past year, I had a blast working with our top customers whose 24/7 business environments demand not only robust NAS services but also performance and space efficiency in an enterprise grade storage solution.

Evolving enterprise business needs mean that we continue to evolve our storage offerings and integrate into both on-premise and cloud environments.

With over a decade of storage innovation, we are well prepared to meet the challenges of 2020 and beyond.

Here are my favorite features in ZFS Storage Land in the past 18 months:

• ZS7-2 platform in 2 cost effective configurations with extreme performance. See our recent specsfs2014 results.
• OS8.8 release with over 40 new features. New features continue to be released through our micro release strategy. See our latest release notes.
• Our encrypted data format is so improved that there is no additional space associated with encrypting data.
• If you choose to encrypt data at rest and use data reduction features on ZFS Storage for full backup use cases, you can realize great data reduction ratios because of the following optimized data transformation process:

Compress --> Encrypt --> Dedup

• ZFS Storage also supports all Oracle Database best practices including TDE if you choose to encrypt on the database server. Because we optimize the above process, data reduction with ZFS storage encryption should meet or exceed your expectations. However, HCC can also be used with TDE that yields great data reduction ratios.
• OS8.8.6 includes the ability to transform unencrypted data to encrypted data during a replication action.
• OS8.8.6 includes cascaded replication and multi-target reversal (MTR) that allow you to cascade replication actions to multiple targets with 3 primary use cases:
  • Source and targets can be reversed beyond the replication source and target nodes
  • Leverage MTR to perform a tech refresh
  • Replication actions can be severed to rebalance busy replication sources
• ZFS integrated, space efficient snapshots can be used to recover from ransomware attacks.
• OS8.8.9 includes the ability to create cloud backup snapshots and the ability to create an OCI object store on ZFS Storage. These features mean that you can either send cloud snapshot backups to OCI object storage in Oracle’s Cloud or to the OCI object store on an on-premise ZFS Appliance. If you want to keep data on premise but also archive data to the OCI object storage, you should give cloud snapshot backups a spin. Primary use cases include:
  • Archiving data
  • Recovering from ransomware attack
  • Providing a third-tier backup copy
• Cloud snapshot backups and on-premise OCI object store can be combined with ZFS replication to migrate data across your data centers and into the cloud and back again.