Oracle Magazine - May/June 2012

“Pillar Axiom . . .
has all of the
components we
need to maintain
exceptional
performance.”

—Stephen Schleiger, Manager of Systems Engineering, Navis

Stephen Schleiger, manager of systems engineering at Navis, depends on the reliability of the Pillar Axiom storage system. “Having a stable data management environment is essential to our customers,” he says.

several steps further than other vendors,” says Woo. “Rather than just
offering an integrated hardware platform, [Oracle] includes technology
that optimizes the movement of data to and from the physical media.”
Oracle Exadata is just one of the platforms in Oracle’s rapidly
evolving storage product line. Oracle has realized similar feats of
engineering with its Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, which is optimized
for NAS storage (see the “Maximizing Options with ZFS” sidebar),
as well as with its Pillar Axiom product line, designed primarily for
SAN environments. And when it comes to backup, disaster recovery,
archiving, and long-term preservation, Oracle continues to lead
the industry with modular library systems such as the Storage Tek
SL8500 and tape drives such as the Storage Tek T10000C.

“Storage systems must respond to a variety of workload demands
and operational exceptions while always ensuring data availability
and integrity,” explains Phil Bullinger,
senior vice president of storage at Oracle.
“The performance requirements of
application workloads, the structure
of the data traffic they generate, the
architecture of the data center, and the
retention lifecycle of the data all influence
the optimal implementation of storage
solutions for various environments. NAS
solutions store data under a file system
and service heterogeneous client systems,
while SAN solutions function as block
storage devices for multiple servers. Tape
complements disk storage by providing an
order-of-magnitude better capacity economics for large data stores,
robust data protection for disaster recovery, and unmatched data
retention for long-term archival.”

SAN SELEC TED

A subsidiary of Cargotec Corporation, Navis provides a software platform that is used at shipping terminals around the world. Its software automates essential functions such as tracking containerized cargo through a port, automating equipment operations, and coordinating cargo among multiple locations. Marine terminals, rail yards, and distribution centers in more than 50 countries rely on Navis’ software to automate and optimize many facets of their operations.

Navis storage engineers selected a SAN environment to meet the escalating demands of a global software development team,

Maximizing Options with ZFS

Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers impressive performance for network-attached storage (NAS)–oriented workloads by combining state-of-the-art hardware and software.

“Hardware provides the capability for speed,
but it takes innovative and efficient software to
actually deliver the complete potential of the
hardware components in application perfor-
mance,” says Phil Bullinger, senior vice president
of storage at Oracle. “Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
combines the highly scalable Oracle Solaris 11 OS,
the ZFS file system, and a rich suite of data man-
agement features with a massively provisioned
Sun server platform that includes multisocket
CPUs with multiple cores and large amounts of
dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and
Flash Cache.”
Another unique aspect of the ZFS architecture
is Oracle’s Hybrid Storage Pool technology, which
allows customers to create virtual pools of storage
that include a combination of traditional spin-
ning disks and solid-state flash, along with sig-
nificant amounts of DRAM. The storage appliance
automatically matches the correct components to
designated workloads to maximize performance.