Oracle Unveils Cloud File System

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The new Oracle Cloud File System released this week gives IT the ability to readily access a pool of storage resources in the “elastic cloud” system. Essentially, the new Cloud File System is designed to help enterprises deploy their applications, databases and storage in the cloud.

Bob Thome, director of product management at Oracle, said the Cloud File System helps remove bottlenecks.

“There are two components, the volume manager sits on top of the file manager, so it looks like any industry standard file system,” Thome, a director of product management at Oracle, told InternetNews.com. “If you look at the NIST definition, the three key characteristics of the cloud are resource pooling, network access and rapid elasticity. This creates a cloud-like pool that lets you share your infrastructure across your databases and also add storage.”The Cloud File System supports file tagging so users can replicate files even if they’re not all in the same directory. “Normally, you might say ‘replicate everything in the critical database.’ But here we let you more efficiently say only the files with the particular tag in it,” said Thome.

Other features of the new release include Oracle Automatic Storage Management Dynamic Volume Manager, which provides volume management support for Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System and other third-party file systems such as Linux ext3. Oracle said this feature allows administrators to store all file system data, including third-party file system data, in Oracle Automatic Storage Management and take advantage of the system’s performance, availability, and manageability features.

The Cloud File System also takes advantage of Oracle Automatic Storage Management to automate the striping and mirroring of data without the need for third-party volume management software. This feature lets company’s add disks as data volumes increase including restriping and rebalancing of data across disks for optimized performance.

“Organizations can move beyond expensive and difficult to manage and scale hardware and storage silos to a highly available, scalable cloud environment that adapts to change in workloads to meet their service level objectives,” Angelo Pruscino, senior vice president of product development at Oracle, said in a statement.

One early customer, Carfax, said the Cloud File System’s advanced and automated data management capabilities are helping the company simplify storage pooling across files, middleware and applications in a cloud.

“In addition, Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System replication coupled with Oracle Data Guard provides a complete disaster recovery solution for database files, external files and all other general purpose files in the operating system,” said Daniel Smith, senior database administrator at Carfax, in a statement.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.