“Storage is growing much faster than the revenues and profits of companies” said Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle User’s Group (IOUG). Storage demand is being driven by regulatory compliance, increased business transactions, and buisiness intelligence, and the bulk of the increased data is unstructured, in the form of graphics. audio, video and emails.
The IOUG conducted a survey in September 2006 of 366 respondents in Oracle shops with more than 5000 employees, 57% of which were database or systems administrators. 31% of those reporting have databases larger than one terabyte.
- 92% expect that their database storage needs will increase in 2007 and 20% says the increase will be more than 50%
- 60% report that database performance has been impacted because of lack of available storage
- 20% had great uncertainty in estimating future storage requirements for ‘non-traditional’ unstructured data. Many of those interviewed buffered their estimated storage needs by 10-25% to account for any unexpected storage need ’surges’.
Database administrators usually have a better sense of estimating storage requirements and they have become more involved in making decisions about storage that in the past may have been handled by different groups within IT. This is another example of how traditional IT responsibilities are being shared with other business organizations.
As storage grows and terabyte-plus databases become commonplace, one problem noted is that disk drives are having a hard time keeping up with application processing requirements. Balancing capacity and performance requirements has become a major challenge for many organizations.
On a related topic, this month Oracle is backing away from any storage vendor-specific support. Oracle announced that they are dropping certifications specific to specialized storage products. In the past, the Oracle Storage Compatibility Program (OSCP) certified compatibility of storage products with Oracle software. Oracle’s comment is that storage technologies are mature and well understood and certifications are no longer needed.
Simultaneously, Oracle has also dropped their “Resilient Low-cost Storage Initiative“. Although the exact reason for why they discontinued this program is not clear.
