Data sitting idle is useless. It’s akin to piling money in the corner of your closet and never using it or earning interest on it. Similarly, data has no value until you make it matter. And making it matter requires using it well. It must be fast, effortless, and efficient for admins to manage and for end users to analyze and turn into usable business insights.
To accomplish that, you need to ensure the infrastructure your data is running on is also fast, effortless, and efficient. Chuck Hollis, Senior Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle, summed it up perfectly: “The single most important asset in the digital economy is data, and infrastructure should be engineered to maximize and exploit its value.”1
In my previous post, I reviewed the key criteria that any data platform infrastructure should offer: reliability, scalability, performance, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. I also reviewed why the Pure Storage Data Platform and all-flash solutions meet these criteria. But why all-flash?
All-Flash Benefits Data Infrastructure
All-flash arrays (AFAs), which are Pure Storage’s area of expertise, offer a number of advantages over traditional storage solutions, particularly compared to spinning hard-disk drives (HDDs), including:
- A consistent level of fast performance and low latency at a better cost-to-performance ratio than HDDs
- The absence of moving mechanical parts that can fail and wear out
- Support for consolidating workloads
- Low power consumption
- Footprint reduction
All of these advantages, along with a steady decrease in the cost of flash technology in recent years, have led to rapid adoption of all-flash in data centers. The NPD Group reported that from March 2016 to March 2017, U.S. dollar sales of AFAs in the business-to-business (B2B) indirect channel rose 72 percent and unit sales for the same period doubled from the previous year.2
With those advantages and that level of industry confidence in all-flash technology, the hardest decision comes down to which all-flash solution your organization should choose. Granted, I’m biased, but I think you should choose Pure Storage. Let me outline why.
Why Pure Storage and Pure Storage FlashBladeTM?
Pure Storage provides a full line of AFA solutions. My favorite option for maximizing the value of data in Oracle data solutions is the Pure Storage FlashBladeTM solution. FlashBlade is designed specifically to support big data and data analytics, making it ideal to help you gain insights from the data in your Oracle® Database or Oracle® Data Warehouse solution. Its four key components are:
- A high performance, software-defined network fabric that admins can manage online at any time
- Scale-out converged file and object storage
- A scale-out operating system
- Built-in raw flash, high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) that run on enterprise-class processors
FlashBlade also works alongside Oracle Database 11g or higher solutions. Its smart storage accelerates large and small block input/output (I/O) and can help maximize your company’s ability to store and quickly analyze huge quantities of non-transactional data alongside transactional data.
We wanted specific data to quantify how well FlashBlade performs, so we conducted internal benchmark testing of Oracle® Direct NFS (dNFS) and FlashBlade. We designed a data-warehouse environment with Oracle® Database12c and performed data-warehouse benchmark tests. In summary, we saw:
- Increased query executions
- Up to 13 TB/hour data ingestion
- Up to 500K I/O operations per second (IOPS)
I’m going to dig deeper into our testing and the results in my next post. But before that, I want to touch on two more reasons — perhaps the biggest — to choose Pure Storage.
More Reasons to Choose Pure Storage Solutions
Pure Storage solutions deliver more than leading performance, they deliver assurance. Assurance that you will have access to the latest storage infrastructure without increasing costs for 10 years or more. What that means is that as technologies evolve and advance, and especially as Pure Storage solutions evolve and advance, so will your storage infrastructure — at no additional cost and with no disruption. Plus, ninety percent of Pure Storage software upgrades are handled remotely by the Pure Storage Pure1® Global Insight team. A solution can’t get any easier to manage for your admins or more cost effective for your company.
Up Next: A Deeper Look at the Results of Our Benchmark Testing of Oracle® dNFS and FlashBlade
For more test results, watch for my next post. Until then, to learn more about our testing and FlashBlade, read the “The Modern Data Platform for Oracle Analytics” solution brief and visit the Pure Storage web site at www.purestorage.com/oracle.
