In a move intended to significantly reduce the complexity associated with hybrid cloud computing, Oracle today unveiled an Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance that doesn’t require a separate gateway to seamlessly share data with the Oracle Cloud.
By eliminating the need for a gateway, Steve Zivanic, vice president for storage and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service at Oracle, says Oracle is not only eliminating a bottleneck, but also allowing IT organizations to share data across a hybrid cloud without incurring additional licensing fees. In contrast, Zivanic says rival storage systems charge IT organizations an average fee of $400 per terabyte every time they move data from a local storage system into a public cloud.
“There’s no cloud access tax,” says Zivanic.
The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance makes use of a file system that can automatically convert data in a format that is compatible with the object storage system that Oracle developed for the Oracle Storage Cloud. The level of integration only applies to hybrid cloud computing deployments involving Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances and the Oracle Public Cloud. Zivanic says that capability provides a level of differentiation at a time when many IT organizations are looking for ways to incorporate public clouds as a natural extension of the IT environments they have running on premise.
While public cloud computing has been around for over a decade, most IT organizations are just now coming to terms with all the nuances associated with hybrid clouds. Today, integrating public clouds with a local IT environment requires reliance on storage gateways and other technologies that increase costs and adversely affect performance. As hybrid cloud computing starts to mature, however, that line between an IT environment running on premise and a public cloud is finally starting to dissipate.
