Oracle Open World Recap: Part IV.5.2

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. He then went on to describe the new Exadata X2-8 machine as the first Exadata machine that uses 8-socket servers instead of the standard 2 socket servers in past versions. The Exadata X2-8 is a database machine & DB with a Linux OS and 8 sockets per node (micro-processers) that allows it to tackle very high-end OLTP loads. A single box has 128 cores and you can string eight of these boxes together with InfiniBand creating “the most powerful OLTP database machine ever built, loaded with DRAM.” Each 19 inch rack has 2TB of DRAM which means that most OLTP databases can fit in memory enhancing the query capability of your machine. These results are without compression and Oracle built a lot of compression into the Oracle Database. By compressing the data “Oracle can put 50TB of your data warehouse into just flash memory,” increasing your performance. For comparison, Oracle has a 5 times throughput improvement versus Netezza and “if you throw in data compression that 5 times improvement goes to 25 times improvement over Netezza. Larry then repeated the theme of the evening when he described Exadata as the ultimate example of “software and hardware engineered to work together.” Larry stated that the value of Exadata was in the engineering: “The Integration of software and hardware was done by the manufacturer and not you, the customer, so that you [the customer] should save a lot of money and time.” The machine consists of the following components:
  • 2  8-socket Intel Servers – allows you to attack high OLTP loads
o   128 DB CPU Cores o   2TB DB Memory o   Solaris or Linux OS
  • InfiniBand Network
  • 14 Storage Servers
  • Faster throughput from disk
  • Much faster with flash
  • 50 TB of data fits in Flash
o   Using 10x Query Compression
  • Effective query throughput on compressed data is even higher
o   Hundreds of GB/Sec
  • Query Throughput GB/sec  uncompressed data single rack
o   50 GB/sec in Flash (25 to Disk 25 to Flash) Larry then went on to extol Exadata’s virtues over High End Disk Arrays. Larry went on to say that Exadata is five, ten times Faster than high end disk arrays such as EMC because of Oracle’s InfiniBand network. Larry definitively stated: “[Disk arrays] will never be competitive because we engineered the storage servers in Exadata to work with the DB servers in Exadata, and that’s why we use this parallel InfiniBand fabric.  Plus we moved a lot of the database software out of the database and into the storage servers, which you don’t’ get with EMC. They can never build anything like that because we re-engineered the database, took it apart, and moved some of it into the storage servers, built a parallel interconnect between the storage servers and the database servers using InfiniBand. And the bandwidth we get really is conservatively 50 times faster than what you get when you talk to an EMC disk array or a NetApp’s disk array or anything like that.” Larry then concluded with his trademark theme for the evening: “It’s what you can achieve if you engineer hardware and software to work together. Larry further reinforced this theme when he announced that Oracle is now going to encrypt everything with Exadata. The encryption is all done in the hardware so when you back up your database the whole thing is encrypted all the way down to the tape; and, “if those tapes disappear, good luck figuring out what’s on them.  You’re not going to lose credit card numbers or social security card numbers or health records and someone’s not going to be able to see that stuff because your database is completely encrypted, always, everything, built into the hardware. “ Moreover, Oracle has eliminated the overhead of database encryption; there’s no performance penalty at all to encrypt all the data in your database.  Exadata encrypts everything software and hardware and because the hardware is encrypted there is no overhead cost associated with the process.
  • Moves decryption from software to hardware at over 5xs faster. Near zero overhead for fully encrypted database.
o   Queries decrypt data at hundreds of Gigabytes/second o   Teradata and Netezza do not have database managed encryption Larry concluded his Exadata review by reiterating the fact that Oracle has been in the Exadata business for a few years now and that they are currently on the third version of the product. Oracle now offers customers a range of products and configurations to meet their most basic and complex OLTP needs. Customers can start with a ¼ rack of the 2-socket database nodes and go all the way up to 8 racks of Oracle’s new X2 Model 8 with the 8-socket nodes.  “So from a fairly low cost, small Exadata server, you can grow that up to by far the largest OLTLP machine that has ever been built.”