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Solution Showcase
Oracle ‘Cloud Converged Storage’ Is a Notable
Step Toward Hybrid IT
Date: April 2017 Author: Mark Peters, Practice Director & Senior Analyst
Abstract: The latest iteration of the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance—specifically release 8.7—offers huge new flash
pools, enhanced integration with Oracle Database, and a granular subscription consumption model…but the greatest
attribute of this new release—the one with long-term ramifications for both Oracle and the industry—is what Oracle
terms “Cloud Converged Storage.” This refers to the embedding of cloud integration into the storage system itself,
essentially making on-premises storage and off-premises cloud-based storage not only connected, but also part of a
unified data-serving system.
Market Context and Announcement Overview
The emergence—and increasing maturity—of what we call “the cloud” is driving enormous change in the IT vendor space.
There’s everything from corporate consolidations (for instance Dell bought EMC, while HPE bought/is buying SimpliVity and
Nimble1) through splits (within both Citrix and HPE) to re-privatization (at the likes of Dell, Veritas, and others). In the
public cloud arena, some vendors are investing (such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM) while others are
changing or withdrawing (HP and Cisco). But why all the change? Vendors are trying to either streamline or align
themselves to this new, “cloud-enhanced” way of “doing IT.” From its software myopia of a few years back, Oracle has
spent the last decade with an evolving vision to be a genuine end-to-end provider of entire IT systems for the increasingly
hybrid IT world—and it has made dramatic strides in terms of ability. The latest release of the ZFS Storage Appliance should
be seen as a significant step down its own path, as well as something of a gauntlet thrown down by Oracle for the rest of
the industry.
Given that viewpoint, the focus of this paper is not to regurgitate myriad product spec-sheet details, but rather to focus on
the user relevance and market implications of this latest ZFS Storage Appliance.2 Nonetheless, as a starting point for the
analysis that follows, the main enhancements to the already compelling capabilities of the fast, agile, and scalable ZFS
Storage Appliance are:
• Cloud Convergence: Oracle is embedding public cloud access into its high-performance storage appliance. The “Oracle
ZFS Cloud” is thus extended functionality within the overall ZFS pool; as such, all the existing data services (NFS, SMB,
1
At the time of publication of this Solution Showcase, the Nimble deal is expected to close within weeks.
A recent ESG Solution Showcase on ZFS (a good source for more specifics about the general ZFS product and capabilities) summarized as follows:
“The latest iteration of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance—the ZS5 series—does three things: (1) it dramatically ramps the product specifications; (2) it
continues Oracle’s ‘better together’ functionalities that come from integrated development with the database team; and (3) it is both wrapped in,
and an integral component of, Oracle’s increasing focus on the cloud as a seamless part of IT. The first two things are extensions of its existing
approach, while the third is as clear a manifestation of Oracle’s strategy as one could imagine.”
This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Oracle and is distributed under license from ESG.
© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
2
Solution Showcase: Oracle ‘Cloud Converged Storage’ Is a Notable Step Toward Hybrid IT
2
replication, etc.) simply work, without any changes to operations or applications. This allows data and applications to
travel seamlessly to and from the Oracle Public Cloud (with end-to-end visibility, diagnostics, and support), which
helps improve operational value and can deliver financial savings.
• Flash Pools: The ZFS Storage Appliance’s existing lickety-split speed—driven by flash cache and up to 3 TB of DRAM—
is enhanced by up to 25% with new pools of up to 2.5 PB of low-latency flash.
• Enhanced “Engineered Storage”: Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP) 2.0 offers further improvements to Oracle’s
“better together” story with extended integration between its storage system and its database. There is dynamic
automation and auto-tuning of the database and storage so that I/O latencies can be cut by up to 93%.3
• “Right to Use” Consumption: This is a pay-as-you-go subscription model, wherein Oracle provisions, monitors, and
applies agreed policies (e.g., replications) to the user’s storage. It can be seen as a further “integration” of aspects of
cloud and on-premises approaches; as such, it is not unique but it is another necessary step for flexible hybrid IT.
• Fast Connect: Customers can co-locate ZFS Storage Appliances at an Oracle data center and, by cross-connecting
cages, effectively achieve on-premises performance in the cloud.
User Implications and Value
Today, the public cloud—in some fashion and to some extent—is a prerequisite in most IT and data hierarchies: Clearly,
with this latest ZFS Storage Appliance, users can move data to Oracle’s Public Cloud, whether it’s for flexibility, cost, data
protection, or compliance. However, while the essence of this was already available in the existing ZFS Storage Appliance,
the new “Cloud Converged Storage”—in which the Oracle Public Cloud becomes, to all intents and purposes, native disk—
has some significant implications beyond the obvious fact of being easier to specify, buy, and use.
• No “Cloud Taxes”: First and foremost, by converging the ZFS Storage Appliance with the Oracle Public Cloud, users will
benefit from what can be termed “native cloud data movement.” This precludes the need for any sort of external
cloud gateway, whether that be of the genuine physical kind (i.e., plumbing hardware and/or software) that has
existed for a few years now, or the increasingly common “virtual” kind that has begun to appear. “Virtual” is, in this
case, simply a pseudonym for the iniquitous cloud access “taxes” that some vendors are now charging their users for
the “privilege” of moving [some of] their data to a public cloud. It is clearly a way for some—invariably non-hybrid—
vendors to try to protect their margins in the burgeoning hybrid IT world, but it is akin to charging toll fees for
someone driving her car onto a public highway! It is not too strong to suggest that while Oracle is focused on
developing its “engineered storage,” some other vendors are focused on “engineering invoices.”
• Management Ease and Assurance: As mentioned, no operational changes are needed; management is the same across
the [now single] integrated storage pool. Consequently, there are no proliferating security products or needs; there is
the same support team, standards, and skill sets; and there are no changes to applications. Moreover, there is a twoway street to/from the cloud because IT needs and business situations can change. For example, in recent ESG
research about SDS solutions, 13% of respondents stated that an SDS solution had replaced their off-premises cloud
storage.4 It does not matter that the research concerned SDS, nor what the motivation was for the change (e.g.,
performance, cost, or “religion”): The hybrid IT world must have (at least!) a two-way street, and Oracle meets that
with its ZFS Cloud Converged Storage. Furthermore, ZFS Storage Appliance is “battle tested,” with an Exabyte in
production across the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Development (Oracle Cloud serves over 70M users, over 4,000
3
4
Source: Oracle published numbers.
Source: ESG Research Report, Software-defined Storage (SDS) Market Trends, February 2017.
© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Solution Showcase: Oracle ‘Cloud Converged Storage’ Is a Notable Step Toward Hybrid IT
3
environments, and over 30 billion database DB transactions per hour).5 This is important because—as ESG research
found—74% of respondents say that architectural congruence between their on-premises and public cloud facilities is
either critical or very important.6
• Enhanced Data Security: Security remains firmly atop today’s IT priorities (see Figure 1).7 While many storage systems
must have security applied to them, the ZFS Storage Appliance has built-in, end-to-end granular encryption and key
management, together with strong authentication and access control, all hardened with checksum protection. And
now, the “Cloud Converged” aspect of the latest generation ZFS Storage Appliance only adds to these strong security
credentials, since a single, integrated system has inherent security value—put colloquially, any plumbing system with
less soldering is going to be less susceptible to leaks!
Beyond its security value, ESG research into the most important current “meta trends” in IT reveals a number of areas
where the ZFS Cloud Converged Storage system can help—contributing to serving data analytics faster, and gaining public
cloud efficiencies, for example (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. 2017 Information Technology ‘Meta Trends’
Which of the following IT initiatives will be the most important (i.e., number 1) for your
organization over the course of 2017? (Percent of respondents, N=641)
Strengthening cybersecurity tools and processes
32%
Using data analytics for real-time business intelligence and
customer insight
17%
Use of public cloud for applications and infrastructure
15%
Data center modernization (i.e., highly virtualized and
automated data center)
15%
Mobility (i.e., providing employees and customers with
mobile access to applications and IT resources)
Reinventing application development processes for a
mobile- and cloud-centric world
12%
9%
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017
Market Relevance and Impact
Beyond the product’s intrinsic value, what is the broader importance of this Oracle announcement? This paper started by
outlining the need for vendors to be able to adapt to/compete in the emerging hybrid IT world. Oracle’s Cloud Converged
Storage is a major element in getting to true hybrid IT. There is no hope (whether you are a user or vendor) to achieve true
dynamic hybrid IT without the free movement of data between systems and places.8 To be fair, for now, this Oracle Hybrid
IT is just that—an end-to-end-Oracle implementation—but Oracle has said it will expand to include other clouds.
5
Source: Oracle published numbers.
Source: Source: ESG Research Report, The Cloud Computing Spectrum, from Private to Hybrid, March 2016.
7 Source: ESG Research Report, 2017 IT Spending Intentions Survey, March 2017.
8 See ESG blog by this paper’s author, 'Hybrid IT' Is Great – Unless It’s Just Pretend, March 2017.
6
© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Solution Showcase: Oracle ‘Cloud Converged Storage’ Is a Notable Step Toward Hybrid IT
4
And the overall IT market is “walking the walk” when it comes to integrating some amount of public cloud into the way that
IT gets done. For example, 93% of ESG research respondents are either using public cloud computing services, or have
plans for/interest in doing so.9
Indeed, other ESG research found that more than two-thirds of organizations with flat or decreasing levels of storage
system spending attribute this change to public cloud services.10 This business is simply not available to vendors that do
not offer a public cloud (ignoring the small pennies on the dollar that may be provided as commissions for directing
storage to a particular public cloud).
Additionally, public cloud is not just a “dumping ground” for old and less-used data (albeit it is good for that too). Forty one
percent of respondents to recent ESG research stated that they used cloud infrastructure services to run production
systems.11 And aside from the expected responses of backup/archive and DR, the top five most-cited purposes for cloud
infrastructure also included dev/test and running business intelligence queries. Oracle is best known for some of those
functions…and in a world where 80% of new applications are either directed to or considered for cloud deployment (see
Figure 2), having both options available in a portfolio—preferably in an integrated, “cloud-converged” fashion—can only
strengthen its appeal.12
Figure 2. Organizations’ Approaches to New Application Deployments
Which of the following best describes the approach your organization takes when it comes
to new application deployments? (Percent of respondents, N=597)
44%
36%
19%
1%
Cloud first policy, i.e., we We consider both on-premises On-premises first policy, i.e.,
deploy a new application using technology resources and
we deploy a new application
public cloud services unless public cloud services equally using on-premises technology
someone makes a compelling when considering how to
resources unless someone
case to deploy it using ondeploy new applications
makes a compelling case to
premises resources
deploy it using public cloud
services
Don’t know
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017
The Bigger Truth
“Cloud Converged Storage” represents much more than a cool new moniker—there is real operational and financial value,
both derived from and designed for a contemporary hybrid IT world. Whether users view it as the cloud getting high
performance, or high-performance on-premises getting a capacious back-end is somewhat missing the point; neither
“gets” the other per se, as they are actually fully integrated, so that for example, you can have high performance in or from
9
Source: ESG Research Report, 2017 IT Spending Intentions Survey, March 2017.
Source: ESG Brief, The Winds of Storage System Spending Change, September 2016
11 Source: ESG Research Report, 2017 IT Spending Intentions Survey, March 2017.
12 ibid.
10
© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Solution Showcase: Oracle ‘Cloud Converged Storage’ Is a Notable Step Toward Hybrid IT
5
the cloud, too. Indeed, it represents a truly different paradigm; one where you can choose to view cloud storage as just an
integral extension of your on-premises storage, or you can view it as the other way around because, in truth, it is neither. It
is one complete, malleable yet integrated data ecosystem—and one without the cloud entrance “tax” that many vendors
charge. As such, it is certainly indicative of the optimized way of the future.
This move by Oracle reflects what some other vendors are trying to do, and what even more will be forced to do. The
“value proposition” of such an approach is extremely easy to summarize: Cloud and on-premises storage become
essentially one entity, consumed flexibly and managed in a unified fashion, which is not just about a hybrid data foundation
for hybrid IT per se. This setup also intrinsically increases security, saves money, enhances data analytics, and so on; in
other words, delivering value across all the current IT “mega trends.”
In data storage specifically, ZFS Cloud Converged Storage puts Oracle in an interesting and compelling position—one that is
different from key “traditional” cloud providers that might not offer a full range of services or on-premises infrastructure
options, and also different from many “traditional” storage vendors that have no public cloud offerings of their own and
that are sometimes resorting to imposing cloud access penalty charges on users (basically charging for thin air).
As monikers go, Cloud Converged Storage is excellent for now—but almost certainly it will not be needed in a few years, as
we will simply have reverted to the term “storage,” since what it represents will simply have become an example construct
of the standard way that “data gets done.” But, for now, it is a beacon on the path toward hybrid IT.
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