Oracle OpenWorld 2013 takes place next week, running September 22 through 26, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. One thing our readers are anxious to learn more about is Oracle’s recently launched storage appliance the ZS3 Storage Appliance, particularly given Oracle’s goals of reducing infrastructure costs with this new product. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his company have been under intentional and unintentional attacks lately from the open source sector, which has cooperatively lowered the cost of setting up and managing the IT department with the introduction of agnostic software and hardware that’s just as adaptable.  It will be interesting to hear how a legacy provider like Oracle is responding to the changing world of IT.

Remember, this is Larry Ellison — his track record for spotting trends and making the right call speaks for itself.  As Wikibon co-founder and Senior Analyst Dave Vellante points out in a recent article, Ellison had the vision to make a string of game-changing decisions,  consolidating software, acquiring Sun Microsystems, providing secure access to Java and implementing the right strategy with “Red Stack,” the all-Oracle integrated solution comprising storage, server, hypervisor, OS, database, middleware, applications and management.

Another big draw from Oracle OpenWorld will be Oracle’s President Mark Hurd’s take on take on the transformative nature of Big Data, a trend that’s forcing CIOs to rethink the datacenter. Hurd’s keynote, “Transforming Businesses with Big Data and Analytics,” will discuss how to craft an IT strategy to manage today’s rapidly ramping volumes of data.

Oracle’s New ZS3 Underscores Integration End Game

SiliconANGLE and analyst firm Wikibon will make the trek to Oracle OpenWorld 2013 later this month, broadcasting the event live from our premier production program, theCUBE. We’ve watched Oracle evolve into an integrated solutions company and the firm’s recent storage announcement highlights Oracle’s strategy to take out operational costs by tightly integrating hardware and software.

Speaking of spotting trends, Vellante goes on to note the recent moves made by Ellison’s team; moves he identified as early as 2010 on how “…Oracle and Microsoft, were intent on bundling more storage function into application stacks to drive down costs. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, Wikibon believes, was inspired by a similar sea change spotted by Ellison. It is our view that he was heavily influenced by the success of Apple’s integrated hardware/software approach and believed he could bring the iPhone metaphor to the enterprise – hardware and software integrated in a seamless solution.”

Today, nearly 70 percent of spending related to server and storage infrastructure goes to labor costs over the life of the systems. Oracle’s strategy is to lower the costs of management, leaving more to spend on Oracle software and integrated systems. The ZS3 Storage Appliance announcement highlights Oracle’s strategy to take out operational costs by tightly integrating hardware and software. This message/strategy will resonate with senior IT executives who want to focus human capital on more strategic activities. CIOs should be able to successfully enhance efficiency with Oracle’s New ZFS Appliances.

The storage infrastructure strategy for Oracle was brilliantly broken down to these four factors by Wikibon CTO David Floyer in his Oracle ZS3 Storage Appliances: Tier-1 Performance at Tier-3 Prices piece last week:

1. The speed at which Oracle can deliver new storage function to the market.
2. The ability of competitors to match Oracle’s value proposition despite being blocked from access to critical database enhancements.
3. The degree to which Oracle’s messaging resonates with application heads and DBAs.
4. The new equilibrium reached in the market – in other words will Oracle’s competitors cozy up to the likes of Microsoft with an open platform strategy that competes with Oracle’s database dominance?

3 Things to Consider with Oracle’s ZS3

According to Floyer, Oracle’s on the right path with the ZS3 in regards to performance and price.

“The performance of the ZS3 is very impressive because it is achieved from a two-controller HA architecture, compared to the multi-node Tier-1 storage arrays from Hitachi & IBM,” Floyer writes. “Notable is the price performance of the system relative to traditional Tier 1 mainframe storage architectures. Customers should bear in mind that the ZS3 is a file-based platform while the Hitachi and IBM systems are block-oriented solutions with significantly more mature high availability functions including synchronous replication.

“Nonetheless, it is our belief that Oracle is providing the R&D muscle that Sun lacked and focusing its efforts on the ZFS appliance, which is a diamond in the Oracle storage portfolio rough. We expect Oracle to continue to enhance the platform and broaden its uses cases. Moreover we believe that Oracle, the company with a reputation for lock-in, will attempt to lock-out competitors by increasingly leveraging integration up the stack while the competition searches for answers to the Oracle integration strategy.”

Floyer goes on to list three things to consider when evaluating the ZS3 and Oracle’s progress in this new era of IT:

1. The degree to which Oracle is able to gain share on-platform. It currently lags behind both EMC and NetApp and we believe has a goal of becoming #1 on its own base.
2. The level of “lock-out” Oracle can achieve (and corresponding unique value creation) by exploiting its own software stack while closing out its platform to former partners such as EMC and NetApp. The key issue here will be how much pressure EMC and NetApp customers will place (or will want to place) on Oracle, the degree to which Oracle resists and the value proposition Oracle is able to convey with this strategy.
3. Future feature expansion to enable the ZFS platform to expand its TAM and extend into Oracle’s traditional database stronghold, while at the same time competing with NetApp’s Clustered ONTAP and EMC’s ever-expanding portfolio.