Recent 10th anniversary celebrations of Oracle Exadata and the ZFS Storage Appliance provide an excellent opportunity to revisit these marvels of engineering.
In a 24/7 business environment, Oracle customers rely on Exadata for hosting their most critical workloads. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance's fantastic RMAN backup and restore performance is a clear advantage to protect Exadata's critical workloads and secure business continuity. ZFS Storage is not just about data protection with extreme performance. It provides a simplified test and development environment for provisioning Oracle Database instances by leveraging integrated snapshot and cloning. It also supports all Oracle Database best practices including TDE and HCC, providing both data encryption and space efficiency for your mission critical business data.
A common complaint I hear from customers is that their current storage platforms don't provide good value:
Some storage vendors discourage the use of Oracle Database best practices, such as using TDE or HCC because if used, the storage vendor's encryption and compression lose value. These vendors want you to forego Oracle Database HCC compression and TDE encryption until after your critical customer data reaches their storage because otherwise you are paying for storage features that you don't need or use.
In contrast, ZFS Storage provides an integrated and efficient platform for critical Exadata workloads, supporting the following features and best practices:
With ZFS Storage, you can decide whether to follow Oracle best practices or follow what works best for your environment:
Have your cake and eat it too!