Saturday, September 17, 2011

Delphix, Solaris and ZFS

I was inspired to write a new blog posting after seeing a great presentation on Delphix.  Delphix is an extremely interesting product to help with the managing of many copies of an oracle database.  This product goes hand-in-hand with a virtualization product like VMWARE. What VMWare is servers, Delphix is to storage.

First I want to babble on a bit.. Why ? Because this is my blog.

I have used Solaris for many years and I am a big fan of Sparc/Solaris, and everything that it became over the years.  I know in the last couple of years, it has kind of fallen down, and Linux x86 has been growing leaps and bounds.  The most impressive piece of Solaris however has been ZFS.  ZFS offers snapshotting, cloning, lots of fantastic options built into the OS.  All very easy for the DBA.

I was very excited when ACFS came out (anyone remember).  It was the coolest thing going.  It looked a lot like ZFS built on top of ASM.   It had the potential to become a fantastic tool.  I was really, really, really hoping that down the road ACFS, and ZFS would combine, and replace the cooked file system with an Oracle File System that Rocked.    Well in case you didn't know ACFS has morphed into the "Cloud File System" or Cloud FS.  This is a licensed product used for the sharing of directories in a "cloud" environment.  Also, if you didn't know, ACFS won't run on the Exadata.  2 nails in the Coffin of this fantastic vision that I had in my head.

I was devastated for a while.

Why the background ? Because Delphix picked up where this vision died.  They offer the ability to do snapshots, along with deduplication, and compression to boot.

Delphix was founded by Jedidiah Yueh, who founded Avamar (dedup software that was sold to EMC),  The company also has  Karthik Rau, ad VP of Products who worked on VMware.  Lots of very bright people that were already involved in the founding technology.

Delphix makes the creation of database copies, easy, and it save space to boot.  I will post the presentation that I saw once I can link to it.

Definitely something worth checking out, and to watch for in the infrastructure Arsenal.

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