place. Oracle continues to enhance its storage solutions and renew
our faith in the solution set that we started with.”
Dick believes that while solid-state disk technology is ideal for
high-performance data retrieval, it’s not a suitable solution for every
part of a storage environment. “If you’re not going to access data for
a period of time, it makes much more sense to let it sit at rest in a
tape library, where you can get it at a minute’s notice, as opposed to
keeping all that data spinning and burning resources—generating
heat and using power,” he points out. “Tape technology has not seen
its swan song. It is still a very viable technology.”
Benjamin Woo, program vice president for worldwide storage
systems at IDC, agrees with this assessment. He says an effective
storage strategy only places truly active data on expensive FC or
solid-state disk drives and moves less-active data to more-cost-
effective storage media—often tape. “It doesn’t make sense to
keep data spinning if you’re not going to be looking at it for a few
months,” he says. “It should reside in less-expensive media. Our
research shows that less than 20 percent of the data in today’s data-
centers is actively used. Thus a very small percentage of information
needs to reside on very expensive, very fast storage.”
These multilevel storage systems are often called tiered storage
environments because they assign different stages of data to dif-
ferent tiers of storage media, with the goal of preserving accessibility
and reducing cost. “Once you have a tiered infrastructure, the key is
to create policies to automate the movement of data so it requires
minimal human intervention,” advises Scott Tracy, senior director of
flash and disk products at Oracle.
According to Tracy, most tiered storage strategies have three
basic components. Primary storage stores new data from mission-critical applications and databases, with access time measured
in seconds. Storage media typically includes ultrahigh performance flash or solid-state disk (SSD) drives and FC storage arrays.
Secondary storage stores 30- to 90-day-old data that needs to be
kept on hand for business continuity as well as fixed content and
backup/recovery data. Access time is measured in minutes, and
storage media includes unified storage solutions such as the Sun
ZFS Storage Appliance and less-expensive SATA disks. Long-term
or archival storage stores data older than 90 days, often for historic
“Oracle’s Sun offerings
presented a unified, efficient,
large-scale storage system
that was flexible enough
to grow.”
—Robert Lovery, CIO, Australian Bureau of Meteorology
reasons or for legal compliance. Access time is measured in hours,
and storage media includes capacity disks and tape. “Use of tiered
storage strategies typically results in around 75 percent reduction in
costs compared to single tiers of disk storage,” notes Tracy.
A MULTI TIERED SOLUTION FOR SCIENTIFIC DATA
Tiered storage is what the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM)
uses to manage multiple petabytes of scientific data. As Australia’s
national weather, climate, and water agency, BOM’s expertise and
services assist Australians in dealing with the harsh realities of their
natural environment, including droughts, floods, fires, storms,
tsunamis, and tropical cyclones. Through regular forecasts, warnings, monitoring, and advice spanning the Australian region and
Antarctic territory, BOM provides one of the most fundamental
and widely used services of government. The agency also supplies
specialized forecasting to the aviation industry, oil rigs, fire departments, police forces, and other emergency services, in addition to
bulk data uploads for universities and scientific organizations.
BOM’s data storage environment was put to the test earlier this
year during Cyclone Yasi, the largest tropical storm to strike Australia
since Europeans first settled there in the 18th century. With winds
of 186 mph and waves on the coast reaching as high as 30 feet, Yasi
wrecked more than 10,000 homes and businesses but did not cause
any fatalities, thanks in part to BOM’s precise forecasts and reliable
information-management infrastructure.
BOM’s Oracle-based data storage environment gathers about 40
TB of data each week from 6,000 meteorological devices including
warning buoys, oceanographic sensing gear, flood hydrology sta-
Unified Storage with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line
delivers unified storage for
Consolidation of multiple storage devices •
Secondary storage for data protection (when •
multiple copies of data are required)
Test/development environments in which orga- •
nizations are optimizing copies of primary data
The product line enables the rapid deploy-
ment of new revenue-producing applications and
lowers expenses by reducing storage complexity
and its associated administrative costs.
Sun ZFS Storage Appliances consolidate files
and block I/O on a single high-capacity, high-
performance storage appliance. This consolida-
tion supports 10 different protocols across three
interconnects—Ethernet, FC, and InfiniBand. Sun
ZFS Storage Appliances are built on the Oracle
Solaris operating system, and they offer data
services including deduplication, compression,
replication, snapshots, and clones.
