Oracle recently bolstered its ZFS hybrid storage line with the ZS3-2 and ZS3-4, two new appliances that take advantage of speedy flash drives and next generation software to beat out the competition. In a fresh report entitled “Oracle ZS3 Storage Appliances: Tier-1 Performance at Tier-3 Prices,” Wikibon founding CTO David Floyer exposes the features that set ZS3 apart from the pack.

The ZS3-2 improves on “almost every aspect” of the original Sun ZFS Storage 7320 architecture, Floyer writes, most notably caching. The appliance packs three times as much SLC flash-backed write-cache as the 7320, while the ZS3-4 leverages SAS-2 drives to deliver an equally impressive threefold increase in available MLC read-flash. With half the cache miss rate of previous generation systems, throughput is effectively doubled.

Other major improvements include data-driven I/O optimization, support for a broader spectrum of file- and block-level protocols, and hybrid columnar compression. Floyer highlights that Oracle’s software-centric approach to hybrid storage not only increases performance, but also reduces costs.

Wikibon found that the ZS3-4 platform has a price performance of $23 per megabyte, which puts it ahead of both the $66/megabyte Hitachi VSP and the $98/megabyte IBM DS8870. Oracle has yet to match the more mature high availability functions that these companies offer, but Floyer expects this to change in the foreseeable future.

“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 advises customers to keep track of the level of lock-out Oracle can achieve, its market share gains in the storage space, and perhaps most importantly, future feature expansions to the ZS line. He recommends that CIOs include the platform in “all RFPs for throughput heavy workloads,” including backup, data warehousing and data analytics.