StorageSummit

Hybrid Storage Arrays
Storage experts discuss the pros & cons of hybrid storage arrays. Are they the best of both worlds?
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John Furrier
Question 5: What do ZS3 Series hybrid storage arrays bring to Oracle Database environments?
Dave Vellante
You know Oracle will tout things like Hybrid Columnar Compression as unique to Oracle storage - which it is in Oracle environments - I haven't studied these use cases in detail however
Steven Zivanic
ZS3 Storage is co-engineered with Oracle Database; it's auto tuned, data is auto tiered and auto compressed. HCC, OISP and ADO provide customers with business advantages and efficiencies.
Bert Latamore
Certainly compressiin & dedup in general r becomingmore important with flash storage & higher available compute.
cmosoares
Beyond just sheer performance, the ZS3 Series has unique advantages (Hybrid Columnar Compression, Automatic Data Optimization+HCC, Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol) not available to third party storage systems, such as EMC and NetApp.
Kerstin Woods
Hybrid Columnar Compression is a good example – compress Oracle Database 10-50X depending on usage for 3-5X less capacity, less energy used, lower upfront costs. And, 3x-8x faster queries.
cmosoares
With HCC customers can get 10-50X Oracle Database data compression, reducing CAPEX and OPEX\
Kerstin Woods
A good summary of the unique advantages ZS3 has for Oracle DB: http://medianetwork....
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance for Oracle Database
The industry’s first Application Engineered Storage, deeply integrated with your Oracle Database and applications to deliver maximum performance, ensure rapid creation of secondary databases, and maintain 24/7 availability.
Dave Vellante
My advice to customers is always - those things are way cool - make sure you can take advantage of them or there's no value there
Steven Zivanic
there's a material difference between storing 800TB or 100TB, across environmentals, operations and overall costs; customers can run the HCC Analyzer tool to determine how much they can save on storage for Oracle Database.
cmosoares
Advanced Data Optimization with HCC – provides policy-driven, usage-based HCC compression and automated data tiering.
Kerstin Woods
@cmosoares ADO is a great one - eliminates manual intervention to reduce the admin workload and accelerates the compression savings & performance advantage.
Kerstin Woods
Compression Advisor for HCC is available here: http://www.oracle.co...
cmosoares
Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP) reduces 65% of manual processes involved in storage tuning for optimal performance. Database sends metadata regarding incoming data is used to tune storage.
John Furrier
Question 4: What workloads are hybrid storage systems best suited for?
Bert Latamore
Also how does software-defined storage and the concept ofbServer SAN http://wikibon.org/w... impact choice of hybrid systems?
Jean-Luc Chatelain
Mixed workload that have a high IOPS requirement but do not want to compromise on throughput when doing very long I/Os example is analytics modeling in big data (time series require long reads but computing the model needs IOPS
John Furrier
@InformationCTO that is interesting to separate transactional data from the sea of big data
Kerstin Woods
Benchmark results below show the ZS3 Series hybrid is superb for latency sensitive and high-throughput streaming applications, such as DB, BIDW, video on demand...
Dave Vellante
Their best suited for the "Fat Middle" - they're not suited for super low latency. They're typically not used for ultra high performance OLTP or super low cost archiving - great for general purpose workloads
Dave Vellante
Also DB-as-a-Service for tier 2 databases
Steven Zivanic
any time-sensitive applications benefit from a hybrid storage system; accelerating a company's time to insight is a key value provided by these offerings
Jean-Luc Chatelain
One example is retail pricing optimization analysis: read in GB long tables of multivariable time series and the compute like a madman with thousands of small R/W/M files then write out a long suite of results ->hroughput then IOPS then throughput
Dave Vellante
Hybrids beautifully fill the white space on this chart http://wikibon.org/w...

Dave Vellante
Right in the fat middle
Kerstin Woods
Backup is another good fit for hybrid system as a demanding workload where sustained write performance is required.
Dave Vellante
Totally agree - backup target is a great fit - super for bandwidth oriented apps
John Furrier
Question 3: What performance and price/performance can you expect from a hybrid storage array?
Dave Vellante
I would contend in the right use cases and at scale hybrid, flash/first arrays will lower capex and opex
Dave Vellante
Here's @dfloyer view of capex opex comparison of hybrid v traditional in file-based use case http://wikibon.org/w...

Kerstin Woods
Oracle ZS3 Series hybrid has demonstrated leading performance, price/performance, and low latency in industry benchmarks with performance and price/performance advantages over EMC, NetApp, IBM, and HDS
Jean-Luc Chatelain
To the risk of sounding marketing'ish (heaven forbid) the right hybrid delivers solid state performance at HDD pricing over mixed workloads
Steven Zivanic
Oracle ZS3 delivers 17 GB/s of throughput at a lower cost than other systems: http://www.oracle.co...
ZFS Storage ZS3-4 Delivers World Record SPC-2 Performance Results - Benchmark | Oracle
ZFS Storage ZS3-4 Delivers World Record SPC-2 Performance Results
cmosoares
@dvellante Wikibon has characterized those use cases , at least as far as ZS3 goes, as high-throughput applications such as data warehousing, backup. See it here ii. http://bit.ly/1icydb...
Dave Vellante
There's an interesting discussion going on in the Wikibon community around optimizing storage infrastructure and cutting
cmosoares
Here's comparative benchmark results for ZS3.
Steven Zivanic
Oracle ZS3 delivers sub-microsecond application response times, demonstrating the capabilities of a true hybrid storage architecture: https://m.oracle.com...
New Oracle ZFS Storage Sets World Record with Fastest Response Times on SPECsfs2008 NFS Benchmark; 40 Percent Faster than NetApp
Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-4 and ZS3-2 Storage Systems Deliver 2x Better Throughput and 3.5x Better Value than Comparable Dual-Node High-End and Mid-Range NetApp Systems
John Furrier
interested in latency sensitive apps...what fall into this category
Michael Dautle
Financial / Trading apps
John Furrier
what about streaming media?
Michael Dautle
Client side buffering generally used with media b/c you cannot always control for all the latency between storage and client.
cmosoares
ZS3 showed lower latency at 7X less cost the EMC VNX8000
cmosoares
See this video for ZS3 vs. EMC and NetApp comparisons Speed, Simplicity, Savings: Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance
http://medianetwork....
Speed. Simplicity. Savings. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance
Your business can run faster and your IT operations can be more streamlined – with the right storage. Get the facts about Oracle’s latest generation ZFS Storage Appliance, the ZS3 Series.
John Furrier
Question 2: 2) What hybrid storage array architecture delivers the best performance?
Dave Vellante
Speaking for @dfloyer I'd say those that were specifically designed to be hybrids and not bolt ons and I would add - those that persist to the flash directly
Jean-Luc Chatelain
Again I don't think it is an architecture per se (although important) but it is the SW intelligence driving the hybrid
Dave Vellante
The storage bottleneck in many workloads is very often de-staging the cache to the backend disk - a "Flash First" architecture (RAM first then flash) signals the write is complete when the flash has it then asynchronously trickles to disk
John Furrier
I ask this question on @theCUBE all the time and the responses are consistent .. "there will never be a tool that serves 100% of the market"
Jean-Luc Chatelain
If workload is 100% IOPS and small capacity then little value to hybrid and same if 100% streaming lots of large files but these are edge cases
Dave Vellante
Remember the original EMC Symmetrix? - the beauty of the architecture was it had a HUGE cache and mega backend disk bandwidth to de-stage the cache. Blew away the performance of everything out there. That was circa 1989 - pre-flash
Bert Latamore
while speed is important it is only one advantage of flash. There is also service level consistency and handling noisy neighbors for instance.
Jean-Luc Chatelain
A well designed hybrid should serve the bell of the curve well and differentiation between vendors should be flexible affinity to different host filesystems and applications
Kevin
de-staging is a huge issue when there is a backing-store cliff like #Exadata which is limited to 32,000 HDD IOPS. Datasheet: http://www.oracle.co...
Jean-Luc Chatelain
@dvellante Yes and the big delta between '89 and today is the economics
Kerstin Woods
@InformationCTO I think it's a combination - you need the right hardware (DRAM/flash size) to be useful AND you need intelligent caching algorithms to use it most effectively.
cmosoares
@InformationCTO Yep, cache was very expensive (in fact so were spinning disks) and of course no flash technology
cmosoares
@KerstinWoods In fact with ZS3 70-90% of I/O is server from extremely fast DRAM