Oracle Launches All-Flash FS1 SAN

Joining the party of all-flash storage arrays Oracle announced an all-flash version of its FS1 Flash Storage System, engineered expressly for Oracle software. Unique to the new FS1-2, Oracle says its Hybrid Columnar Compression data reduction technology typically delivers a 10:1 compression ratio, which is almost twice the reduction usually obtained with deduplication techniques.

Designed for concurrent mixed workloads Oracle says the new system will scale as high as 64 all-flash domains for highly-secure data isolation in multitenant cloud environments, and I/O prioritization based on business value. With a focus on high IOPS and throughput Oracle says the FS1-2 can scale to 912TB of flash, and up to 2.8PB of combined flash and disk. The company also lays claim to a sub-30 minute pallet to power on setup time.

While defending its storage portfolio Oracle drives home the performance benefits of co-engineering hardware and software compared to others, fixating specifically on EMC. In tests it performed for customers, Oracle says it demonstrated sub-one millisecond latency when running simultaneous workloads across small to large block sizes with up to 8x faster IOPS and 9.7x faster write throughput than EMC XtremIO.

Oracle's senior vice president of Flash Storage Systems Mike Workman says that customers are looking to flash to run workloads at full speeds and prevent slow OLTP response times. Workman notes that the new FS1-2 system "dramatically reduces I/O wait times typically seen in today’s highly virtualized, transaction-driven enterprises where low latency is critical to response time."

IDC Storage research director Eric Burgener defines the new offering in the category of true All Flash Arrays(AFAs) and says that "AFAs feature unique designs that are specifically optimized for flash media, delivering more consistent performance across their entire throughput range than Hybrid Flash Arrays, and making them the storage platform of choice for application environments that demand the highest levels of performance."