Oracle Debuting FS1 Series Flash Storage System

At a live event on  January 21, 2015, Oracle Corp.‘s executive COB and CTO Larry Ellison outlined the company’s strategy for reducing customer costs and increasing value with a new generation of engineered systems, including new Virtual Compute Appliance X5, FS1 Series Flash Storage System, and sixth-generation Exadata Database Machine X5.

FS1 Series Flash Storage System

Oracle’s integrated appliances are simple to use and ready for production deployment out of the box. Oracle experts integrate, optimize, automate, test, patch, and support the full software and hardware stack, lowering customer costs. More than 10,000 units have shipped to date as customers across the globe adopt Oracle engineered systems and appliances to simplify their IT infrastructures, speed application deployments, and increase data center productivity.

“We’re going to compete for that core data center business. Our appliances and engineered systems deliver the highest performance by a large margin at the lowest purchase price for the data center core. They get the job done faster, more securely and more reliably than any competitive offering available today,” said Ellison. “Our customers want their data centers to be as simple and as automated as possible. With some of Oracle’s engineered systems and appliances, you can pay 50% less, but you have to be willing to take twice the performance.“

New generation of integrated appliances include:

• Virtual Compute Appliance X5: Paired with the FS1 Series Flash Storage System, the Virtual Compute Appliance provides a complete, converged infrastructure system. Deployed in a matter of hours, this system reduces cost, risk, installation, and management time, and gives customers the ability to reduce infrastructure complexity by as much as 70%, deploy applications 7x faster, and cut capital expenditures by as much as 50%. Compared to Cisco plus EMC, Virtual Compute Appliance is 50% cheaper and easier to deploy.
• Database Appliance X5: For distributed and branch office deployments, Database Appliance offers a package of compute, storage, and software that saves time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of database and application workloads. The appliance adds flash caching, integrated IB connectivity, increased compute cores, and increased storage to improve consolidation density by up to 4x.
• Big Data Appliance X5: Delivers comprehensive and secure Hadoop and NoSQL capabilities to the enterprise at a 35% lower three-year TCO and with 30% faster deployment time than a custom-built cluster. For faster, lower-cost throughput, the appliance comes with twice the RAM and 2.25x the processor cores. Also available on the appliance is the latest version of Oracle Big Data SQL, which extends SQL to Hadoop and NoSQL, enabling customers to use one fast SQL query across all their data, with no application changes.
• Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance X5: Provides a database-integrated data protection solution that eliminates data loss exposure for all Oracle databases, with minimal impact to production environments. Available, this new version offers faster processors and up to 30% expanded capacity within a single rack, enabling faster recovery, higher throughput, and improved database backup consolidation.

Sixth-Generation Exadata Database Machine X5
The sixth-generation Exadata Database Machine is a performing and lowest-cost platform for running Oracle Database. Exadata’s architecture features scale-out database servers, scale-out intelligent storage servers, and IB networking.

Exadata X5 includes:

• Faster base performance: 50% faster processors, 50% larger maximum memory capacity, and faster and larger flash increase overall performance.
• Extreme flash storage server: A newly introduced all-flash storage server uses fast PCIe flash drives, the latest NVMe flash protocol, and IB scale-out to achieve performance and low price per I/O. Oracle Exadata X5-2, Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 and SuperCluster M6-32 engineered systems can be configured with extreme flash storage servers.
  Elastic configurations: Storage and compute can now be configured and expanded one server at a time to provide granular on-demand expansion at a lower cost. Elastic configurations allow customers to configure Database In-Memory optimized systems as well as all-flash OLTP systems.
• Oracle VM support: Consolidated environments can achieve a high level of workload isolation using Oracle VM while taking advantage of IB networking. VM-based licensing reduces software costs.
  New software features: Exadata X5 has many new software capabilities, including faster pure columnar flash caching, database snapshots, flash cache resource management, near-instant server death detection, I/O latency capping, and offload of JSON and XML analytics, as well as support for Oracle Linux 6.
• Investment protection: Existing Exadata systems can be expanded with new X5-2 servers, and new software features are supported on previous generations of Oracle Exadata hardware.
• Exabus Connectivity: Exadata X5-2 supports native Exabus connectivity to the updated Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2. It delivers performance and scalability for Java, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications and will provide customers the ability to run on premise the same Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service capability offered in Oracle Cloud.