Exadata Larry, after expounding on the benefits of Oracle’s high performance cloud computing server—Exalogic— he went on to further tout version 3 of Oracle’s renowned database machine—Exadata. With the release of version 3, Oracle now offers customers two versions of its acclaimed database machine: X2-2 and X2-8. “The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. There are now four configurations of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack half-rack and full-rack systems. Offering customers a choice of configurations for managing small to large database deployments, the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack machines can scale to multi-rack configurations for the most demanding database applications.” Larry emphatically proclaimed that Exadata has become the best machine for data warehousing and OLTP and he used SoftBank as an example. He indicated that at SoftBank Oracle replaced a 60-rack Teradata machines with only 3 full racks of Exadata and depending on the application those three (3) Exadata racks, ran 2xs to 8xs faster than the 60 rack Teradata configuration with only 5% of the hardware. Oracle eliminated 95% of the racks and on average still ran 5 times faster.

Exalogic Larry Ellison continued his key note from Sunday by reintroducing Exalogic a “high performance server with hardware and middleware specifically designed for running public or private cloud systems. “ We spent a lot of time optimizing Oracle software to run on the Exalogic box,” Larry said. He referred to Exalogic as “one big honkin’ cloud,” and called the system “the fastest computer for running Java applications software” and said “it could be used for application consolidation or for running both public and private cloud systems.” The internal components of the system include: The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server combines 64-bit x86 hardware, a total of 30 compute servers with 360 cores, with Oracle middleware such as the Weblogic server, Oracle Coherence data grid software, JRockit Java runtime software and Oracle VM virtualization software. The system uses infiniBand technology (capable of handling 40 gigabits per second) to link its internal components, has 2.8 TB of DRAM, 4TB of read cache and 960 GB of solid-state disk storage. Oracle will offer Linux and the Solaris operating systems with Exalogic.

This is part three in a four part blog series Oracle Open World (OOW) Recap. To view part two, visit Oracle Open World Recap – Part II Similar to the Keynote on Sunday, Larry entered the stage and began his presentation to highlights of his America’s Cup victory. Still beaming over the victory, Larry graciously introduced members of the America’s Cup team that were in attendance and asked that they stand, as they stood and took a bow they received a much deserved round of applause and cheers. The stage was designed in the traditional Oracle two screen set -up and bathed Larry in a warm reddish hue. Larry wore his trademark dark suit and turtleneck and limited his bombastic and condescending comments to Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. Surprisingly, he only made one self-effacing or arrogant comment, depending on your perspective, when he called Bugatti his favorite commuter car. Not sure how many of us commute to work in a Bugatti so I don’t know how to interpret that comment so I will leave the interpretation up to the readers so that they can draw their own conclusion.

For Public Sector (“PS”) customers, the networking continued on Monday night at the only purely PS focused event at Open World, the annual Oracle Public Sector Reception at Jillian’s. This Industry event is where PS customers could meet with Oracle PS experts for a night of food, drink, and sports, in a casual environment while watching Monday Night Football on several big screen TV’s in a fun sports atmosphere. This year’s event was heavily attended relative to past years; I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout.. The pool tables were packed with lines 2-3 people deep at each table so some additional games would have helped alleviate the overflow on the pool tables. This was a good problem to have considering that the majority of attendees were customers and not Oracle employees. I would suggest to Jillian’s that they add foosball and air hockey to their inventory of games next year to help alleviate the wait for a pool table. I would specifically suggest these two games based on their popularity at the “Game Zone” lounge in the Exhibit Hall. Both of these games were extremely popular and were only preceded in popularity by “Dance Dance Revolution” and the ever popular “Pop a Shot!” The only thing not included in the carnival atmosphere of the Exhibit halls and game lounge was a carnival barker, a palm reader, candied applies, and stuffed animals. I left having won 3 out of 5 air hockey games but without any prizes or cotton candy for my efforts. I did, however, have a wonderful time and I encourage Oracle to keep up that tradition at future Open Worlds especially for those attendees that bring children.

I just returned from Oracle Open World (“OOW”) 2010 and it was a tremendous show. In fact, it was so outstanding that I had to break my analysis into four parts: my two part general overview of the conference, a preview of Oracle’s most recent product announcements, and a preview of Oracle’s latest addition to the Exadata product line. This year’s version of Open World was extremely well organized and attended. The events are always top notch and they do a very nice job with logistics moving people around the city and in/out of the Moscone Center (which is one of the better convention centers I’ve attended.). The weather was very accommodating (mid 70’s light breeze) with no rain. The planning committee should take this into consideration given that last year’s convention in October experienced tumultuous rain storms and impaired an otherwise great convention. The weather in September has been consistently better over the years than in October and hopefully OOW will be solidly entrenched in September going forward.