Oracle Announces New Storage ZFS Systems – ZS3 ZS3-4

October 2013

Oracle’s new ZFS (Zettabyte File System) ZS3 ZS3-4 series made its introduction this week. They are the only storage appliances with real-time, dynamic application-aware performance and health analytics, enabling customers to visualize CPU, cache, protocol, disk, memory, networking and system-related data — all at the same time.
The new ZS3 systems deliver an advanced cache architecture and multi-threaded SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) operating system, which the company claims enables higher throughput, lower latency, and better price/performance compared to competing products from NetApp, EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.
And unlike some other engineered-together Oracle systems, the ZFS storage appliances do not require Oracle servers and software. “These will run quite well with commodity and other types of legacy hardware and software,” Oracle said. “However, for them to run optimally and get the highest level of performance, we of course recommend our own servers and Oracle Database 12.”
The storage arrays also take advantage of Oracle-only storage features and capabilities, such as the new Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP), which automates Oracle Database tuning and administration.
The ZS3’s SMP operating system fully uses a next-generation architecture, massive cache and multi-core processors to provide users with over 32G bps of sustained bandwidth within a single system. This enables ZS3 to support thousands of virtual machines per system, thus handling extremely highly threaded I/O that saturates conventional NAS filers, leading to filer sprawl.
DTrace Storage Analytics, a standard feature of Oracle ZFS storage appliances, enables customers to troubleshoot 44 percent faster with 38 percent less complexity than NetApp FAS3270, according to an independent study.