Oracle has introduced the Oracle Cloud File System, which is designed to help organizations deploy their applications, databases, and storage in private clouds. It delivers a cloud infrastructure that provides network access, rapid elasticity and provisioning for pooled storage resources that are the key requirements for cloud computing. With Oracle Cloud File System customers can use Oracle Database features to manage application data stored outside of an Oracle Database.
Key features provided in the Oracle Cloud File system include the ability to take space-efficient point-in-time snapshots, as well as to do replication of files and file systems for backups and disaster protection, Bob Thome, director of product management, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We have had, for years, features within the database that allow you to create a disaster recovery site using a standby database. It is a feature called DataGuard, but it only protected your database files," explains Thome. "For all these companion files that people had in a file system, they had to rely on some other mechanism, typically from a third party, to mirror those files over to the disaster recovery site. Now that we have a file system that can also replicate all its data, just like the database does, over to the disaster recovery site, we give a complete solution to protect all your data - your file system data and your database data in the event of a disaster."
The Oracle Cloud File System also enables fine-grained data access security as well as encryption and decryption that is completely transparent to the user, says Thome.
In addition, the solution allows users to do aggregate management operations via file tags, enabling greater efficiency, Thome adds.
The Oracle Cloud File System comprises two components, Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System and Oracle Automatic Storage Management Dynamic Volume Manager. For complete details, go here.