For years, customers have reported that Oracle resisted embracing VMware, preferring to offer clients Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) instead. Realizing that a large portion of its customers run VMware, Oracle has seemingly broadened its strategy to be more inclusive and is targeting VMware installations.

At this year’s VMworld, Oracle Corporation claimed its ZFS Storage ZS3 Series was the only storage in-memory centric architecture on the floor. According to Oracle, its system stumps NetApp, Inc.’s FAS6000, which boots 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) in under 20 minutes. According to Oracle, its ZS3 Series has the capability to boot directly out of memory 16,000 VMs in under seven minutes and 20,000 VMs in under 10 minutes, both at a list price of under $200,000. According to Oracle VP of Storage Business Group Steve Zivanic in an interview for theCUBE at VMworld, this is just one of multiple metrics in which Oracle’s ZFS Storage ZS3 Series outperforms NetApp’s FAS6000.

Zivanic shared that three years ago, Oracle was one of NetApp’s largest customers worldwide. Oracle claims it achieved about 250 VMs per NetApp FAS6000, at which point the CPU would be pegged at 100 percent and another filer would have to be bought and the process would repeat. Oracle told theCUBE that when it shifted from NetApp to the prior generation ZFS Storage Appliance, it achieved a nine to one VM consolidation ratio. Oracle claims it was able to achieve 2,300 VMS per individual system, while only at a 33% CPU utilization rate. It also went from 11 NetApp filers and 500TB per storage admin to 38 ZFS appliances and 5PB per storage admin, in one department according to Zivanic. Additionally, Oracle claims it saved 80% in space and 74% in power.

Zivanic also pointed out that after it removed NetApp from its internal environments, it has since grown its ZFS deployment to north of 200 Petabytes, powering Oracle Managed Cloud Services, IT production environments and application development across private and public clouds. “ZFS Storage Appliance is the data backbone of Oracle worldwide,” said Zivanic.

Zivanic also pointed out that Oracle databases time out when trying to write to storage every 200 milliseconds. Zivanic pointed out that if you collect analytics data every 30 seconds there are 150 200 millisecond windows for your database to time out before a customer would have any data to trouble shoot. Zivanic said that Oracle’s Dtrace Analytics software, part of its ZFS Storage Appliance, is ideal for VMware environments as it scans for data every 1 second and is integrated with Vsphere, enabling companies to drill down to the VMDK level, the NIC level or the file level at speeds that can keep pace with Oracle Database. According to Zivanic, NetApp has an analytical tool that scans for data every five minutes, while Oracle’s closest competitor has one that takes scans every 30 seconds. “That means in a 30-second window, you’ve got 150 opportunities for timing out when you haven’t achieved and obtained any shred of data,” said Zivanic.

Zivanic pointed out that performance wise, both Oracle and NetApp published benchmark data that when compared, suggest the ZS3 storage achieved a world record SPECsfs2008_NFS 700 microsecond application overall response time at a list price of about $500,000. In contrast, the NetApp FAS6000 delivered a 1.54 millisecond application response time at list price of close to $2 million. Zivanic pointed out that with NetApp, customers would have to pay four times more to get performance that’s twice as slow.

Here’s the full video of the Oracle interview.

Image credit: Oracle, ZFS Storage ZS3-2; https://www.oracle.com/storage/nas/zs3-2/index.html