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An Oracle White Paper

March 2010

Get More Storage Efficiency withSun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems



Oracle White Paper—Get More Storage Efficiency with Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

Executive Overview............................................................................. 1

Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

Open Storage...................................................................................... 3

What Is Open Storage?................................................................... 3

Advantages of Open-Source Software............................................ 4

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems....................................... 4

Breaking Through Economic and Performance Barriers ................. 5

Hybrid Storage Pools ...................................................................... 6

Simple Storage Management.......................................................... 8

Increased Storage Efficiency ........................................................ 10

Reduced Risk with Industry-Leading Data Protection ................... 10

Most Comprehensive Self-Healing Storage System ..................... 10

Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools ...................................... 11

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems Family ..................... 12

Get Started on the Right Track ..................................................... 14

Conclusion ........................................................................................ 14




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Executive OverviewExponential data growth is challenging today’s IT managers to scale their storage

capacity while delivering high performance and staying within tight budgets. Oracle can

help ease this pain by offering the first unified storage solution that optimizes

performance with Hybrid Storage Pools (HSPs) and delivers radical simplification of

storage deployment and management—all at a cost that redefines the economics of

storage. Oracle’s Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems offer a complete, open,

and integrated solution that can help reduce time to deployment and reduce risk. The

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems DTrace Analytics software and the systems’

self-healing capabilities help simplify storage deployment and management. These

features allow IT teams to quickly find and fix issues, minimize downtime, and reduce the

cost of deployment.

IntroductionThe rapid growth of new digital data demands new storage architectures that offer more

flexibility and radically different storage economics. IDC estimates that the total amount of

digital information created, captured, and replicated will grow at a rate of 58 percent per

year reaching 1,610 exabytes by 2011. 1 With application storage requirements growing

at this tremendous rate, storage costs are skyrocketing. At the same time, a challenging

global economy has kept IT budgets flat or declining. IT managers are thus caught in a

bind between trying to meet the growing needs for increased storage capacity and

performance while containing costs.

1 IDC, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,March 2008.




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As storage capacities have grown, traditional means of deploying and managing storage

have become outdated. Most of today’s storage systems require a highly trained

administrator to effectively manage the environment. This adds time and cost to

deployment of new storage systems and increases the ongoing cost of managing the

environment.

Perhaps most important, with customers implementing or maintaining large storage

networks, it has become increasingly difficult to troubleshoot and fix storage performance

issues. Most tools currently available offer limited visibility because they lack an end-to-

end view that encompasses multiple layers from the CPU and application to the storage

file system, operating system, and data services.

Customers can no longer tolerate the high costs of proprietary storage or massive

licensing fees and are looking for new ways to address their growing storage

requirements and their challenges in managing storage environments. Today’s IT

environments require storage solutions that can offer

• Greater simplicity and ease of use

• Real-time diagnostics and tuning

• Massive scalability

• Better storage economics




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Open Storage

A new market for open storage solutions is developing in response to today’s storagerequirements. Oracle’s best estimate is that open storage products and services will represent justless than 12 percent of the total storage market in 2011. With IDC estimating the total storagemarket hardware, software, and services at approximately US$90 billion in 2011, Oracleexpects the open storage portion to be just more than US$10.6 billion. Oracle also predicts thatby 2011, open storage will represent more than 20 percent of the external disk market, orapproximately US$5 billion of the US$24 billion external disk market.

What Is Open Storage?

Open storage systems combine industry standard hardware with open source software and are

supported by a community of thousands who have a passion to create better storage solutions. This powerful combination helps spur innovation and drives better storage economics. Thesystems can leverage volume servers and disk drives as well as an open storage software stack tospeed storage innovation. Unlike traditional proprietary storage solutions, open storage solutionsoffer freedom of choice at every level of the storage system stack (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Proprietary versus open storage systems

In proprietary systems, storage software is closed and is typically three times the cost. Customers

generally must purchase a storage controller and controller software from the storage vendor,and then also pay for individual features, usually with capacity-based software licenses. Lastly,customers must buy the disks enclosed within the storage system. In most cases, these arecommodity disks that are marked up as much as five times the original cost.




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By contrast, open storage architectures use open source software and industry standard hardwarecomponents. Leveraging an industry standard server in place of an expensive, proprietary disk controller reduces both cost and risk, because standard components offer economies of scale andhave already been proven in other applications. Oracle Solaris Zettabyte File System (ZFS),

which originated in the open source OpenSolaris operating system, is now included in the OracleSolaris operating system for no additional licensing fee. Oracle Solaris ZFS provides data services

such as RAID, error correction, and system management, thus insulating applications from theunderlying hardware. Such services have traditionally been tied to specific hardware devices andhave been available only when bundled with an expensive controller.

Customers can purchase high-performance, affordable disk systems at market prices, enabling much greater price/performance.

Advantages of Open Source Software

The benefits of leveraging community development and open source software can include

• Lower costs. No additional software licensing fees and low-cost community support.

•

Choice. Users do not need to wait for a single vendor to develop new software functionality when they can find similar functionality already available through the development community or can help develop the functionality they need through the community.

• Innovation. Software and application innovation is no longer limited by a vendor’s businessgoals or research and development budget.

Sun open storage from Oracle is based on an open storage architecture and Oracle Solaris ZFS.Oracle leverages the benefits of open storage to meet today’s challenging storage requirements.

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems provide all the benefits of open storage in aneasy-to-use appliance package so organizations can dramatically simplify their storagedeployment and management. These unified storage systems provide unmatched simplicity andease of use through an intuitive and powerful management interface. Revolutionary business

“Sun has provided a platform for the democratization of the storage industry. We have found the appropriate level of operating

system support we need to run our business through the OpenSolaris storage community, which saves significant time and

money. I participate in the community daily and see real business value in the projects that are being created by some of the

industry’s most important players.”

— Jason Williams, COO and CTO, DigiTar




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analytics functionality also allows administrators to quickly diagnose and resolve performanceissues in production systems.

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems change the economics of storage by using a high-performance Hybrid Storage Pool (HSP) architecture, industry standard components, and openstorage interfaces. The systems offer up to 288 TB of capacity using a combination of solid-statedrives (SSDs), DRAM, and hard disk drives (HDDs). HSPs use SSDs for read and write cache,enabling higher performance than traditional storage architectures at up to 75 percent less cost.

Figure 2. Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

Breaking Through Economic and Performance Barriers

Modern servers are fast approaching processing capabilities in excess of 1 million I/O operationsper second (IOPS); however, mechanical disk drives have failed to keep up with the serverperformance growth curve. Today’s fastest drives are capable of 300 IOPS to 400 IOPS. Toachieve a level of storage I/O throughput that matches today’s server performance and meets thedemanding requirements of data-intensive applications, most storage vendors recommend a largepool of 15 K RPM disk drives. In some cases, a large buffer of expensive DRAM is alsodeployed so that the entire working set can be stored in memory to reduce latency.

Not only are these traditional storage architectures complex and costly to acquire, but they arealso expensive to operate and manage. High RPM drives consume significantly more power thanlower RPM drives. And the software tools that are used to manage these environments typically require a highly trained administrator, adding further costs for ongoing management and making it more challenging to maintain high service levels for storage systems and related applications.

Recent advances in production of flash technology have made SSDs and other flash storagedevices much more cost effective, enabling a new approach to tiered storage. Flash technology is interesting because it falls in a price/performance “sweet spot” between mechanical drivesand DRAM.




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Mechanical disk drives are very cost efficient for storing data, but they are also relatively slow compared to flash storage. Flash technology can be used to increase the performance of mechanical drives by providing read and write cache that offers very low latency while alsodelivering greater power efficiency. Although flash storage is significantly more expensive thanmechanical drives, it is also significantly cheaper and denser than DRAM storage.

Taking Advantage of Flash Technology with the Oracle Solaris ZFS

Taking advantage of the performance and cost characteristics of flash storage requires anenabling technology that recognizes the performance characteristics of media such as SSDs andcan transparently optimize performance across multiple types of media.

Unlike less-sophisticated file systems, Oracle Solaris ZFS recognizes different media types and will optimize how it handles each type to help maximize file system throughput and applicationperformance. Oracle Solaris ZFS also automates the process of data placement so thatadministration efforts and the risk of human errors are greatly reduced.

The Oracle Solaris ZFS file system can take advantage of flash storage today by transparently caching data for both reads and writes. Just as Oracle Solaris ZFS recognizes when high-speedserial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives are present and can automatically take advantage of theirperformance characteristics, so too it recognizes various forms of flash storage, enabling evenmore significant performance gains.

Caching frequently accessed data in SSDs can help minimize the impact of disk latencies andimprove application performance. Because enterprise SSDs offer low latency, they can generally keep up with CPU I/O throughput, and HDDs can then be used to store massive data sets.Oracle Solaris ZFS provides the means to automate the process of keeping the most active datain the enterprise SSD read cache, while also buffering data writes in a separate cache area.

Hybrid Storage Pools

HSPs typically include DRAM, a read cache, a write cache, and a high-capacity storage area. Eachof these different storage categories can be implemented with different types of storage media.However, if performance requirements demand it, an HSP can use high-performance media suchas SSDs in all storage categories, including the high-capacity storage area.

As shown in Figure 3, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems use read-optimized and write-optimized SSDs for the read and write caches in the HSP. HDDs are used for the high-capacity storage area. The entire storage infrastructure can then appear as fast as flash storage to itsapplications, enabling the systems to deliver higher performance at up to 75 percent less costthan traditional storage architectures.




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Figure 3. Oracle Solaris ZFS transparently optimizes data placement across HDDs and SSDs to deliver improved throughput.

Oracle Solaris ZFS transparently executes writes to the pool of low-latency SSD media so that writes can be quickly acknowledged, allowing the application to continue processing. The data isthen automatically flushed to HDDs as a background task performed by Oracle Solaris ZFS.

Another pool of SSD media acts as a read cache, and Oracle Solaris ZFS manages the processof copying frequently accessed data into this read cache where it can be retrieved with very low latency.

Oracle Solaris ZFS looks at usage patterns to determine whether and how to use the different

storage media. For example, large synchronous writes, such as video streaming, do not benefitfrom caching, so Oracle Solaris ZFS does not try to copy this type of data to write cache.Similarly, the read cache is populated based on an intelligent algorithm that takes into accountnot only the most recently used data, but also anticipated read requests and estimated data to beheld in DRAM.

The most significant effect of using HSPs to manage data placement is that flash storage such asSSDs can drive enough performance to enable high-speed Fibre Channel disk drives to bereplaced by high-capacity drives. These high-capacity drives enable dramatic cost reductions instorage acquisition costs as well as lower power and cooling costs. At the same time, storageadministrators are freed from the laborious task of ongoing storage optimization efforts.

This HSP approach provides the benefits of high-performance SSDs while still saving money with low-cost high-capacity disk drives. Applications can be completely isolated from slowermechanical disk drives, unlocking new levels of performance and higher ROI.




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Simple Storage Management

The Sun Storage 7000 series provides unmatched simplicity and ease of use through innovative

new storage software that includes a browser-based management interface and unprecedentedbusiness analytics functionality. A rich set of data services helps simplify administration andimprove service levels. All the software features and data services that are available with SunStorage 7000 Unified Storage Systems are standard features that are included without any additional license fees.

Easy to Deploy

Provisioning and management is dramatically simplified through the easy-to-use managementinterface that takes the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning. Asillustrated in Figure 4, the browser-based interface provides an intuitive environment forperforming administration tasks, visualizing concepts, and analyzing performance data. In simpleconfigurations, such as installing the system as a high-speed backup solution for an existing storage environment, systems can literally be set up and configured in minutes. The click-and-drag installation wizard does not require a highly trained system administrator, thus saving organizations valuable time. For more-complex configurations such as a high-performance filesystem consisting of multiple storage systems to be shared by virtualized servers, Oracle’sprofessional services offering can help speed deployment and reduce the risk of downtime ordata loss.

Figure 4. Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems help simplify deployment.




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Real-time statistical graphs can be used to quickly locate and isolate problems as well as optimizestorage performance and capacity use—all while systems continue running in production.

Statistics can also be archived to disk so performance data can be reviewed and analyzedthroughout the life of the system. Dedicated archive capacity allows administrators to preservehistorical data for up to 7 to 10 years. Archive data sets can be suspended or resumed as desired,or they can be destroyed if no longer needed.

DTrace Analytics gives administrators all the tools they need to quickly identify and diagnosesystem performance issues, perform capacity planning, and debug live storage and networking problems, before they become challenging for the entire network.

Increased Storage Efficiency

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems can help save datacenter floor space and reduce

storage acquisition costs by improving storage efficiency. The systems offer built-in softwarecompression as a new alternative for compressing data files. Because the compression is handled

within the storage platform, it helps conserve CPU resources in the server that is handling theapplication load.

Reduced Risk with Industry-Leading Data Protection

Sun Storage 7000 software is the only software that protects data from as many as three drivefailures with triple-parity RAID. With disk drives getting larger and many organizationsimplementing wider striping across more drives for increased performance, a third-parity bithelps reduce the risk of data loss. Triple mirroring also offers a great way to increase random

read performance for application workloads such as the Oracle database. Automatic dataintegrity checking and correction built into the software includes block-level checksums and self-healing capabilities at the block level, providing additional protection for enterprise data.

Most Comprehensive Self-Healing Storage System

Sun Storage 7000 systems take advantage of the Oracle Solaris Fault Management Architecture toautomatically and silently detect and diagnose underlying problems using an extensible set of agents. When a faulty component is discovered, the self-healing system automatically respondsby taking the faulty component offline. Automatic data integrity checking and correction is alsoprovided by Oracle Solaris ZFS. If its block-level checksums identify a corrupt block, OracleSolaris ZFS automatically repairs it, providing self-healing capabilities at the block level.

The systems include easy-to-understand diagnostic messages. The diagnostic messages are linkedto articles in Oracle’s knowledgebase to clearly guide administrators through corrective tasks

when human intervention is required.




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Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

The following scenarios illustrate how HSPs can help address some of the most pressing

business issues facing today’s organizations.

Scenario 1: Reducing Total Cost of Ownership

A customer requires 46 TB of storage for a high-performance file system and is concerned about TCO as well as datacenter space. In comparing a popular solution against the Sun Storage 7000series, the customer finds that the Sun Storage 7410 system not only offers significantly lowercosts, but also provides the following key advantages:

• No additional software license fees compared to more than US$50,000 in software licensesrequired with the alternative system

• Delivers equivalent throughput and better performance without expensive and power-hungry

15 K RPM drives• Provides the same 46 TB capacity in less than one-third the space with its densely packaged

12 rack unit (12U) system

When considering TCO, the differences were staggering:

• Savings of 75 percent in TCO over three years

• Power and cooling costs that are 2.5 times less

• More than 60 percent lower annual operating costs for power, space, and cooling

• 75 percent lower initial purchase price for the system and required software licenses

Scenario 2: Enabling Business Expansion Without More Datacenter Space

A large online service provider hosts private branded Web-based reservation systems. Eachbranded system serves millions of customers and has stringent service-level requirements (SLAs).

With traditional storage technologies, meeting the end-user response times as outlined in SLAsrequires a storage array with two hundred and fifty 15 K SAS drives for each branded system.Unfortunately, the provider has filled its existing datacenter and is out of space, power, andcooling. Growing the business would therefore require building a brand new and costly datacenter.

HSPs can provide a way to address these restrictions, allowing the service provider to expand its

storage and meet SLAs with significantly fewer disk drives. Thus, the HSPs can help the serviceprovider grow its business while avoiding the cost of building a brand new datacenter.




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Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems Family

To meet a variety of customer needs for capacity, price, and performance, the Sun Storage 7000

Unified Storage Systems come in three different configurations plus cluster configurations thatoffer maximum availability.

All nonclustered systems come bundled with the same software, including data protocols,replication, compression, and DTrace Analytics software for system troubleshooting andperformance optimization. Clustered systems include an additional software module for clustersoftware features.

Sun Storage 7110 System

This entry-level, easy-to-install storage appliance is well suited for small and medium businessesand departments as well as remote offices of large corporations. It uses the same software as the

high-end configurations, and delivers up to 4.2 TB of raw capacity in a 2U package using 10 K rpm SAS drives. With the Sun Storage 7110 system, customers can acquire easy-to-use enterprisedata management functionality at entry-level costs.


The Sun Storage 7210 system is a midrange configuration that radically simplifies enterprisestorage management and offers extremely high density with up to 46 TB of raw capacity in a 4Usystem that can be expanded up to 142 TB. This system includes write-optimized SSD, so it isideal for organizations that require high-volume throughput for write operations and yet do notrequire the extensive capacity available in the high-end Sun Storage 7410 system. Such customerscan conserve rack space and achieve additional savings in energy consumption by deploying theirapplication using the Sun Storage 7210 system. The system uses 7200 rpm HDDs to achieve highenergy efficiency.


The Sun Storage 7310 system redefines mission-critical entry storage for the enterprise, offering simplified management, performance, efficiency, and seamless expansion to meet today’sgrowing storage needs. It provides a high-availability cluster option with scalability up to 96 TBof raw capacity and supports HSPs that can be configured with up to 600 GB of read cache andoptional write-optimized cache for enhanced application performance.


The Sun Storage 7410 system is a high-end unified storage system that offers radically simplifiedstorage management and up to 288 TB of raw capacity for extreme scalability. The systemdelivers superior performance while reducing energy consumption with its HSP architecture.




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The Sun Storage 7410 system is ideal for organizations with demanding performancerequirements and where rapid growth in file-based information is expected. It allows customersto start small (10 TB), and then increase storage capacity, computational power, or read/writestorage cache to meet their changing business needs. Like the Sun Storage 7210 system, thisconfiguration also uses 7200 rpm HDDs for high energy efficiency. With the Sun Storage 7410system, customers achieve maximum scalability and performance combined with conservation of power, space, and cooling. For customers that require maximum protection against downtime,the Sun Storage 7410 system supports a two-node cluster configuration. The system features anactive-active architecture with no single point of failure, enabling high performance and highavailability to maximize business productivity.

CONFIGURATION INFORMATION FOR SUN STORAGE 7000 UNIFIED STORAGE SYSTEMS

KEY CUSTOMER

REQUIRMENT

MAX STORAGE

CAPACITY (RAW)

SPACE

(RACK

UNITS)

WRITE

OPTIMIZED

SOLID-STATE

DRIVE

READ

OPTIMIZED

SOLID-STATE

DRIVE

CLUSTER

OPTION

Sun Storage

7110 system

Low-priced entry-

level system with

all software

features

2 TB or 4.2 TB

(16 x 2.5"

146 GB or

300 GB disks)

2U N N N

Sun Storage

7210 system

Midrange

scalability and

performance in a

compact energy-

efficient 4U system

46 TB (48 x 3.5"

1 TB disks)

and up to

142 TB with two

optional Just a

Bunch of Disks

arrays*

4U Up to two

SSDs

N N

Sun Storage

7310 system

Entry-level cluster

option for high

availability

96 TB 1U per node,

4U per

storage

array

Up to 16 SSDs

for cluster

configuration

Up to 600 GB,

or up to 1.2 TB

for cluster

configuration

Y

Sun Storage

7410 system

Best

price/performance

and maximum

growth path

288 TB 2U per node,

4U per

storage

array

Up to 16 SSDs

for cluster

configuration

Up to 600 GB,

or up to 1.2 TB

for cluster

configuration

Y

* There are two specific configurations of the Sun Storage J4500 array that can be used with the Sun Storage 7210 system: a 24 TB array with 48 x 500 GB 7,200 rpm drives, and a48 TB array with 48 x 1 TB 7200 rpm drives.




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Get Started on the Right Track

Oracle makes it even easier to deploy its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems with

professional services that can help mitigate the risk of downtime, data loss, and costly delays.Oracle’s award-winning support and professional and managed services can help reduce costsand speed time to market, while optimizing datacenter power, space, and cooling.

Some service offerings that are specific to the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems includethe following:

• Advanced Installation service for the Sun Storage 7000 family. The Oracle AdvancedInstallation service for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems goes beyond basicinstallation to include configuration into an existing storage operational environment,configuration with directory services, and setup of failover configuration. Oracle provides theinstallation assistance and expertise required to achieve a smooth, successful startup and to

ensure that systems are running at an optimal level right from the start.• Unified Storage Data Migration service. Minimize disruption and gain full-featured

functionality of new technology investments when migrating from other platforms. Customerscan achieve faster ROI by leveraging Oracle’s deep technical expertise and provenimplementation and migration tools.

• SunSpectrum Service Plan . Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems are covered under asingle service contract that provides the features of both Sun software and Sun StorageTek service plans. The unified service plan can help simplify and reduce the cost of managing an ITinfrastructure while delivering greater ROI.

• Auto Service Request . For customers who want maximum protection of their data, Oracle

also offers automated services for remotely monitoring and managing storage systems. Theseremote services are designed to help customers increase service availability, reduceadministration time, maintain storage system performance, and manage datacenterenvironments more efficiently.

• Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System Administration. These courses are designed tohelp administrators gain a deep knowledge of Sun Storage 7000 systems through knowledgetransfer that will allow staff to be more productive.

Conclusion

Oracle’s approach to open storage leverages Sun’s more than 40 years of investment in systemreliability and scalability to deliver cost-effective solutions that address some of today’s mostchallenging business issues. Oracle’s Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems bring a new levelof simplicity and price/performance to the open storage market by integrating innovative storagesoftware with HSPs and an open architecture solution.




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Customers can benefit by using these new systems to

• Simplify storage deployment and management

• Dramatically reduce the cost of high-performance storage

• Increase service levels using DTrace Analytics software to quickly diagnose and troubleshootstorage performance or availability issues



Get More Storage Efficiency with Sun Storage

7000 Unified Storage SystemsMarch 2010

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