Oracle chief Larry Ellison unveiled the latest version of its Exadata data warehousing appliance.
The release had three primary goal:
- Knock data warehousing rivals Netezza and Teradata;
- Show that Oracle wasn’t going to let IBM punch Sun anymore;
- And illustrate some of the logic behind the Sun acquisition
What is so special about this Exadata warehouse?
Oracle Exadata Storage Servers combine smart storage software from Oracle and industry-standard hardware from Sun to deliver the industry’s highest database storage performance. To overcome the limitations of conventional storage, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers use a massively parallel architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage. In addition, smart storage software offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The result is faster parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections. This massively parallel architecture also offers linear scalability and mission-critical reliability.
Notable benefits:
- Extreme Performance for Data Warehouses
- Extreme Performance for OLTP Applications
- Extreme Performance for Mixed Workloads
How is this high performance a reality?
Now with the newest release of the Oracle Exadata Storage Server, you can also achieve extreme performance for transaction processing and consolidated mixed application workloads. Exadata Smart Flash Cache addresses the disk random I/O bottleneck problem by transparently moving hot data to Sun FlashFire cards. You get ten times faster I/O response time and use ten times fewer disks for business applications from Oracle and third-party providers.
The new memory layer (Processor Cache’s -> DRAM -> Flash Cache -> Disk) coupled with Oracle’s algorithms to effectively use the Flash Cache layer brings performance benefit to the solution (+ all the other improvements 12 months of hardware innovation brings, faster CPU’s, more memory etc).
What does it actually have?
The Oracle Exadata Storage Server (Data Sheet, PDF):
- 2U Storage “unit” with either 1 TB SAS or 3.3 TB SATA redundant capacity. There is a query processor in the box that can “offload” tasks from the main database server. Primary filtering, decompression, joins, backups.
- Storage units linked to database servers via dual Infiniband offering 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GBytes/sec) bandwidth.
Some interesting aspects of the Oracle Exadata Storage server.
Performance
The data sheet presents two options: 1 TB with SAS with 1000 MB/s bandwidth; or 3.3 TB with SATA and 750 MB/sec. Compression is “extra”, meaning in a typical data warehouse you get 2-3 times compression, meaning your actual bandwidth will be 2000-3000 MB/sec from a single Exadata server.
Redundancy
Mirroring is provided by ASM (either 2- or 3-way). It is also performed across Exadata storage servers.
Disk failure does not abort queries or transaction.
Exadata Storage server does abort queries or transactions, but with no data loss.
Manageability
There’s a plug-in available for 10g Enterprise Manager, a GUI to manage all that.
For more:
Check this blog for further details.
-Vidhya, Student Intern
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