(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

What’s a Cloud Converged system? It is really what us naive people thought hybrid storage was all about all along.  Yet until now no high performance enterprise class storage ever actually delivered it.  But now, Oracle’s latest ZFS Storage Appliance, the ZS5, comes natively integrated with Oracle Cloud storage. What does that mean? On-premise ZS5 Storage Object pools now extend organically into Oracle Cloud storage (which is also made up of ZS storage) – no gateway or third party software required.
 
Oracle has essentially brought enterprise hybrid cloud storage to market, no integration required. I’m not really surprised that Oracle has been able to roll this out, but I am a little surprised that they are leading the market in this area.
 
Why hasn’t Dell EMC come up with a straightforward hybrid cloud leveraging their enterprise storage and cloud solutions? Despite having all the parts, they failed to actually produce the long desired converged solution – maybe due to internal competition between infrastructure and cloud divisions? Well, guess what. Customers want to buy hybrid storage, not bundles or bunches of parts and disparate services that could be integrated (not to mention wondering who supports the resulting stack of stuff).
 
Some companies so married to their legacy solutions that they, like NetApp for example, don’t even offer their own cloud services – maybe they were hoping this cloud thing would just blow over? Maybe all those public cloud providers would stick with web 2.0 apps and wouldn’t compete for enterprise GB dollars?
 
(Microsoft does have StorSimple which may have pioneered on-prem storage integrated with cloud tiering (to Azure). However, StorSimple is not a high performance, enterprise class solution (capable of handling PBs+ with massive memory accelerated performance). And it appears that Microsoft is no longer driving direct sales of StorSimple, apparently positioning it now only as one of many on-ramps to herd SME’s fully into Azure.)
 
We’ve reported on the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance itself before. It has been highly augmented over the years. The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is a great filer on its own, competing favorably on price and performance with all the major NAS vendors. And it provides extra value with all the Oracle Database co-engineering poured into it.  And now that it’s inherently cloud enabled, we think for some folks it’s likely the last storage NAS they will ever need to invest in (if you’ll want more performance, you will likely move to in-memory solutions, and if you want more capacity – well that’s what the cloud is for!).
 
Oracle’s Public Cloud is made up of – actually built out of – Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances. That means the same storage is running on the customer’s premise as in the public cloud they are connected with. Not only does this eliminate a whole raft of potential issues, but solving any problems that might arise is going to be much simpler – (and less likely to happen given the scale of Oracle’s own deployment of their own hardware first).
 
Compare this to NetApp’s offering to run a virtual image of NetApp storage in a public cloud that only layers up complexity and potential failure points. We don’t see many taking the risk of running or migrating production data into that kind of storage. Their NPS co-located private cloud storage is perhaps a better offering, but the customer still owns and operates all the storage – there is really no public cloud storage benefit like elasticity or utility pricing.
 
Other public clouds and on-prem storage can certainly be linked with products like Attunity CloudBeam, or additional cloud gateways or replication solutions.  But these complications are exactly what Oracle’s new offering does away with.
 
There is certainly a core vendor alignment of on-premises Oracle storage with an Oracle Cloud subscription, and no room for cross-cloud brokering at this point. But a ZFS Storage Appliance presents no more technical lock-in than any other NAS (other than the claim that they are more performant at less cost, especially for key workloads that run Oracle Database.), nor does Oracle Cloud restrict the client to just Oracle on-premise storage.
 
And if you are buying into the Oracle ZFS family, you will probably find that the co-engineering benefits with Oracle Database (and Oracle Cloud) makes the set of them all that much more attractive (technically and financially). I haven’t done recent pricing in this area, but I think we’d find that while there may be cheaper cloud storage prices per vanilla GB out there, looking at the full TCO for an enterprise GB, hybrid features and agility could bring Oracle Cloud Converged Storage to the top of the list.

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