Oracle ZFS as a storage solution in Oracle environments

Rating: 10 out of 10

February 3, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have implemented the ZFS Storage appliance as a robotic solution for storage and backup of environments with Exadata which have very high demands due to the nature of the transactions and the need for long-term backup. In the same sense, the ability to connect the ZFS Storage Appliance via Infiniband provides reliable connectivity with low latency, meeting the particular needs of Telco companies.

Pros

Native connectivity with an Oracle environment, either Exadata or traditional architecture, as well as SPARC.
Ideal storage to work with Oracle Solaris Zones providing maximum performance.
In environments where replication to secondary sites is established, the configuration can be set natively to both the primary and standby servers.

Cons

Because it was due to a software originally designed for Solaris. configuration in other environments can be cumbersome for inexperienced implementers.
The proprietary particularity of this File System makes it in some cases very difficult to implement in highly heterogeneous environments.
I think that additional forms of integration with more environments should be created.

Likelihood to Recommend

For scenarios where the implementation is an Oracle ecosystem and the need for high-performance storage is present, undoubtedly the ideal solution is Oracle ZFS due to the native integration that exists, for example, with SPARC equipment, Exadata, and traditional architecture running Oracle Linux or Solariums (depending on the case), as well as in highly demanding industries in terms of storage.

Hely Villarroel

Information Technology Consultant in Information Technology at Self Employed (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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Our experience with ZFS in an Open Source environment

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 26, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ZFS is a storage filesystem used on [primarly] server machines. It is used by the IT department to help fulfill our data storage needs. ZFS offers the best available technology for performance and stability, while also implementing a lot of amazing features to allow IT professionals the monitor disk health, backup disks, and recover from failures incredibly quickly and easily.

Pros

Software RAIDZ. Create storage arrays using best available RAID technologies for excellent disk stability
Array images and backups. Allows administrators to instantly create disk snapshots, to minimize time disk is unavailable (on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours).
Automatic de-deduplication/compression. ZFS will automatically de-dedup data on disk, allowing for more efficient use of the entire disk for unique data. It will also automatically compress data stored on the disk, allowing for even more usage of the available disk space. Great for infrequently accessed backups (There is some performance cost to compression).

Cons

The CLI tools have a bit of a learning curve to them, there are a lot of tools and commands available. Learning all of them is a large task.
The documentation is very dense. This is great, but makes it hard to get up to speed, incrementally, quickly.
It's still (relatively) new, so I'd expect getting buy-in from larger enterprises to be a bit of an up-hill battle.
Deploying on an existing system requires a completely separate storage array, as you need to reformat and set-up the storage devices without any data on them. This might be prohibitively expensive on time or resources to deploy on existing storage infrastructures.

Likelihood to Recommend

In our case, we use ZFS to store MySQL data. Our MySQL data is of paramount importance, and we need to ensure that the storage that it is kept on is not only fast but also reliable. We can not risk an event that would wipe out all our data. For this reason, we use ZFS to create software RAIDZ to maximize storage redundancy on each MySQL server. We also utilize the ZFS instant snapshot tools to get fully consistent backups of our data without needing to take servers offline for hours at a time.

The snapshotting tools are excellent, and allow you to migrate the snapshot data off disk very easily, and import it onto new disks just as easily (so restoring from backups is a cinch).

We find ZFS to be a perfect solution for this use case, and I'd expect anyone with similar requirements would see the same benefits.

Jim Rubenstein

Chief Technology Officer in Engineering at LoudDoor, LLC (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Oracle ZFS Reviews & Insights