Oracle has designs on taking significant share from the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) market, and is now touting what it calls an industry-first offering as a differentiator. Here are the details from Oracle's announcement:
Oracle today unveiled the industry's first Cloud Converged Storage, representing the first time a public cloud provider at scale has integrated its cloud services with its on-premises, high performance NAS storage systems. Oracle ZFS Cloud software, included in the latest Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance release, enables organizations to easily and seamlessly move data and/or applications to the cloud to optimize value and savings, while eliminating the need for external cloud gateways and avoiding the costs of software licenses and cloud access licenses--AKA "cloud entrance taxes"—charged by legacy on-premises vendors for the right to access the public cloud from their infrastructure platforms.
Oracle claims its Cloud Converged Storage setup results in an 87 percent lower total cost of ownership when compared to "one industry competitor."
Again and again, Oracle's announcement focuses on the benefits of linking on-premises and cloud storage from the same vendor. (It's worth noting that Oracle's public cloud storage is built with ZFS appliances.)
Oracle's approach removes the burden on users to do their own on-premises to public cloud integration, manage environments comprised of different security requirements, support teams, industry standards, and skill sets, as well as the struggle with end-to-end visibility, diagnostics and support.
In addition, on-premises NAS (network attached storage) vendors don't have public clouds, while public cloud vendors don't have on-premises NAS systems, Oracle claims. While this is true to an extent—helped out by the fact that Dell and Hewlett-Packard both scuttled their public cloud offerings in 2015—one can argue that IBM has offered rough equivalents to Oracle's new offering for some time.
Use cases for Cloud Converged Storage include backup and recovery, dev and test, archiving and workload migration, Oracle says. Oracle is also shipping some new features aimed at improving the performance of its database when used in conjuction with its storage technology. Intelligent Storage Protocol 2.0 can increase OLAP (online transaction processing) by up to 19 percent and RMAN backup performance by up to 33 percent, without the need for adminstrators to do anything, according to a statement.
Every vendor engages in chest-beating about the raw power of their products and Oracle isn't acting any differently here. What should perk up the ears of ZFS customers is the idea of those "cloud entrance taxes" going away, as well as no need for a gateway.
On the other hand, if you're not currently a ZFS storage shop, Cloud Converged Storage doesn't make much sense without a significant investment in on-premises hardware. Oracle's announcement didn't speak to any incentives related to ZFS hardware acquisition.
In addition, Cloud Converged Storage is tightly coupled to Oracle's public cloud; don't expect the company to create similarly seamless tie-ins to the likes of AWS or Azure. ZFS customers can still integrate with other public cloud services but this will require a separate gateway. Once the numbers get crunched, ZFS customers may find it makes more financial, as well as technical, sense to stick with Oracle's public cloud.
In hindsight, Oracle's Cloud Converged Storage announcement was inevitable following last year's release of the ZS5 version of the ZFS appliance. The system was originally designed for IaaS but Oracle kept on-premises deployments in mind, as Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller writes in an in-depth report accessible here.
It's not clear how much impact Cloud Converged Storage will have on Oracle's bottom line, but its messaging, focusing on tight integration and the removal of unfriendly additional costs, may have a ripple effect in the market.
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