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Oracle ♥s Fibre Channel in virty box refresh
Virtual compute appliance adds support for not-dead-yet networking protocol
Oracle has made a small-but-notable enhancement to its virtual compute appliance (VCA): support for external fibre channel storage.
The VCA is Oracle's “engineered system” for virtualisation and is designed to offer everything one needs to run VMs, all packaged into a single convenient box. Oracle even recommends its own ZFS Storage Appliance as the ideal external storage, should you chose not to use the onboard storage and adding extra VCAs as your scaling option.
The notion that customers would ignore their existing storage assets when standing up a VCA is, of course, fanciful. And with the new 2.01 version of the appliance announced today there's also support for fibre channel storage, too. That's surely a recognition that there's still a lot of legacy storage out there that Oracle customers want to hook up to their VCAs. And perhaps also a hint that ZFS appliances aren't setting the world on fire.
Oracle this week told your correspondent that it has passed the 10,000 engineered systems sold milestone. The company's most recent results announcement also saw it tell the market hardware sales are up two percent over the last year. That's not a colossal number, but any growth is welcome given the cloud's potential to reduce hardware sales.
If adding fibre channel is what it takes to keep that growth growing, who wouldn't do it? But let's not file this under “FC not dead yet”, shall we? ®