Oracle introduced a number of enhancements to its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System this week, including support for Fibre Channel, data deduplication and compression, and 1TB and 2TB SAS drives. The additions are available on all models in the 7000 family, including the 7110, 7310 and 7410.
Support for 4Gbps and 8Gbps Fibre Channel is a first for the 7000 Unified Storage System, which also supports Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE and InfiniBand (IP/RDMA) external connections, and the NFS, CIFS and iSCSI protocols. Users can configure the 7400 series arrays with up to eight 4Gbps or 8Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces.
Support for Fibre Channel also enables administrators to use Oracle/Sun’s DTrace Analytics tools in SAN environments. DTrace allows administrators to locate SAN hot spots and bottlenecks, get information on how configuration and application changes will affect the SAN storage environment, and to provision solid-state disk (SSD) flash drives in Hybrid Storage Pools.
Oracle also integrated real-time, inline (as opposed to post processing) block-level data deduplication and compression in the Solaris ZFS-based Sun Storage 7000 array. The company claims capacity reduction of 50% to 80% using data deduplication.
In addition, Oracle is among the first vendors to offer 1TB and 2TB SAS drives. The multi-sourced 1TB and 2TB drives have a rotation rate of 7,000rpm and a data transfer rate of 6Gbps. SAS drives can be tiered with DRAM and SSD flash drives (single-level cell or multi-level cell) in a Hybrid Storage Pool.
Using 2TB SAS drives doubles the Sun Storage 7000’s total capacity to 576TB, which can be accessed as a single file system, according to Jason Schaffer, Oracle’s senior director of product management for storage.