back to article What's Oracle got up its sleeve?

A disk drive array can't cut it: Oracle says its 31 January game-changing announcement will provide a "dramatic leap in storage technology" for enterprise data centres. A disk drive array alone can't provide that. What can the technology be? Whatever it is, it will offer, Oracle says:- Much lower costs—per terabyte of …

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  1. TeeCee Gold badge

    So to summarise, you reckon they've missed a footnote?

    Thus:

    "Dramatically higher performance[1]"

    [1]When compared to competing tape products.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    HSM

    Well, if the faster bit is SSD and the cheaper bit is tape, then it must be something to do with HSM. Oracle/Sun's business is based around the integrated "Red Stack", so don't assume that the technology is all at one layer: if your data and application layers can be "HSM aware" then you're in a better position to make real-life use of hierarchical storage.

    Keeping all your data in SAN attached tier-1 storage is, like, so last decade.

    1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Hybrid

      If the faster bit is SSD, the cheaper bit could simply be hard disks that spin slower, use less power, and have a higher density. I'd imagine it would be targeted to online services where the active data doesn't fit in Oracle's RAM cache but could fit in a few TB of SSD cache. The SSD would cost a lot, but not nearly as much as building the entire RAID from top-performing spinning disks.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Lower cost?

    Must be announcing a competitors product then..

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Well...

    I reckon you could take a Linux box with a 1TB drive, and a little bit of software that dumps everything past 1TB to /dev/null, and you'd make a fortune selling it as a high speed/high capacity backup device. Unless you were really unlucky it could be years before anyone noticed...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Brains!

    ...it's a million humans brains, hooked up in parallel. No overheating issues, high performance, amazing storage density.

    There were a few ethical issues, but nothing moneybags-Elison couldn't fix by waving some wonga. Bonus - he even uses the brain fluid as a heat sink for the next door conventional Datacentre (which in turn, keeps the brain fluid at body temperature).

    Personally, I want to know where he found that enough brains that hadn't be "low level formatted" by watching multiple episodes of X-Factor or Strictly-come-whatever.

  6. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Coat

    Software, software, software?

    Assuming it is a big archive device (or maybe a mixed-tiered device), what software will it be running? What will do the clever stuff in between what will presuambly be Oracle application data arriving at the array and its ensuing existance being punted between tiers? The old Sun HSM product doesn't seem tightly integrated enough with the other Oracle products to provide a one-stop-shop "appliance". Or is it more likely to be just a refresh of Exadata with a new tape library bolted on the side for so-called "integrated backup", all wrapped up in more LarryBluster(TM) as "new", "revolutionary" and "fastest in the industry". What the heck, I've got nothing more interesting to do that day, I might as well waste ten minutes listening to Larry.

    /so need a Yawn icon.

  7. FozzyBear
    IT Angle

    Oh it was tech based

    I honestly thought they would be announcing another major lawsuit against another company seeking another billion dollar payout. My bad,

  8. Magellan

    SAM-ZFS?

    Sun bought the company LSC in 2001. LSC had two products, Storage and Archive Manager File System (SAM-FS) and the parallel SAN filesystem Quick File System (QFS).

    SAM-FS was interesting because it was an hierarchical storage manager which functioned as a local filesystem, not as a separate product. Since SAM could integrate with other filesystems (SAM-QFS was also offered to the HPC market), there was talk of integrating Sun's ZFS with SAM to create SAM-ZFS.

    Combining ZFS' ability to leverage flash nearline storage, and also clone and snapshot midline disk storage, with SAM's archiving to SATA and tape, and integrating this into a storage appliance, one could create a storage system which combines four tiers of storage (flash, nearline disk, midline disk, and tape) and do it in an intelligent and automated manner.

    This, combined with Exadata for processing the data could be very useful for large data archives, but it would not solve the disaster recovery problem of off-siting data.

    1. Kebabbert

      @Magellan

      And let us not forget the most important ZFS feature: it protects your data against Bit Rot, Silent Corruption, etc. Arguably no other filesystem does that. XFS, ReiserFS, JFS, etc - does not according to researchers:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity

  9. Register watcher

    File compression anyone?

    This may be a strange concept.. but what about file compression? That the faastest way to get more "stuff" stored.. just a thought

    1. spencer

      eh?

      Doesn't this happen already?

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