An Oracle blog about ZFS Storage
- May 17, 2019
Celebrating a Partnership of Modern Innovation
Recent 10th anniversary celebrations of Oracle Exadata and the ZFS Storage Appliance provide an excellent opportunity to revisit these marvels of engineering.
- Exadata provides the best performance and consolidation platform for Oracle Database (Exadata)
- ZFS Storage Appliance is the perfect storage platform for RMAN backups and an efficient Oracle Database development environment
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:
- Slow backup/restore performance threaten business continuity
- Lack of Oracle Database integration
- Lack of support for Oracle Database best practices
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:
- OISP and dNFS for best performance including OISPv2 negative cache hints to improve Oracle Database performance with RMAN backup
- Oracle Database HCC compression for best data reduction in the 10X-50X range
- OEM integration for a single management pane including storage management and snapshot and cloning
- Analytics with Oracle Database PDB visibility and AWR semantics
- Oracle Database RMAN encryption/compression
- Oracle Database TDE encryption
With ZFS Storage, you can decide whether to follow Oracle best practices or follow what works best for your environment:
- Compress and encrypt data on the Oracle Database server (Exadata or other server) with HCC or TDE.
- Compress, encrypt, and deduplicate on the ZFS Storage system. It certainly has the horsepower to handle it.
- Use a combination of services:
- Enable TDE on the Oracle Database server
- Deduplicate the RMAN backup on ZFS Storage
Have your cake and eat it too!