Our technology can deliver a 100-fold app performance boost, brags Oracle

Software giant outlines how acquisition of Pillar Data Systems fits with company strategy

Oracle last night claimed it could boost customers application performance a 100-fold, but only if you use its hardware and software.

The claim, made at a strategy update presentation at its Redwood Shores headquarters yesterday, comes days after Oracle announced it would buy storage area network (SAN) vendor Pillar Data Systems for an undisclosed sum.

Oracle president Mark Hurd said, "We think we can run applications 10 times faster using a 10th of the storage capacity."

Some of the speed savings come from having to manage less storage, the company explained.

Instead of using one petabyte (1PB = 1,000TB) of storage, Hurd said, customers would require just 100TB (1TB = 1,000GB).

"That's a huge change in cost and complexity, and since you can run [applications] 10 times faster, that's a hundred-fold performance boost," claimed Hurd.

Oracle systems executive vice-president John Fowler admitted that Hurd had made some bold claims, and quipped, "When we tell customers we can boost their database query response 70-fold, they come back with, 'You obviously have an interesting pharmaceutical habit'."

Fowler said Oracle's systems are already optimised for end-to-end performance, with the applications themselves provisioning storage rather than IT staff doing it.

"Offloading database queries and seamless integration with solid state storage devices, plus the ability to move compression technology into the storage devices themselves, also gives us the performance and storage reduction," said Fowler.

"We didn't make the disks faster, we've re-engineered the architecture between the servers and storage, which gives, for example, a 70-times increase in performing database queries," added Fowler.

The purchase of Pillar Data Systems will help Oracle offer these increased speeds on SAN architectures.

Oracle storage senior vice-president Phil Bullinger outlined how the acquisition is the final jigsaw piece in the puzzle for Oracle.

"We believe the [Pillar's] architecture is well suited to the way we're going. Pillar's Axiom hardware can [automatically] align system resources with application requirements, and it continually tunes these requirements," said Bullinger.

"Axiom can scale linearly as well. As your business scales, you can land more applications on this platform. Installing these systems is easy, and the simplified set-up and management means you can have these systems running in your own datacentre in under two hours, with no professional help," claimed Bullinger.

Adding the Axiom SAN platform to Oracle's Exadata database systems, its StorageTek tape systems, and its NAS ZFS hardware and software means "it's the perfect platform for the SAN side of our business", concluded Bullinger.

Earlier in the strategy update, Oracle's Hurd outlined the market opportunity for Oracle, quoting from a May report from market intelligence firm IDC.

The report predicts enterprise storage capacity would rise from the 2010 figure of 1,200 exabytes (1EB = 1,000 petabytes) to 35,000 exabytes in 2020, a 29-fold increase "due to explosion in storage requirements for social networking and mobile data", said Hurd.