A year ago Larry Ellison announced Exadata, Oracle's latest attempt to get into the hardware business. It was followed by the announcement of Exadata v2 (video), which significantly improves upon the first version. I don't think that Oracle wants to expand into hardware per se, but instead is targeting systems. The difference is optimization. When hardware and software are optimized to work together, you can offer customers a solution that not only simplifies implementations, but also offers greater functionality and performance. Enter Exadata.
Strictly speaking, Exadata is the intelligent storage server, not the entire solution. The Database Machine is the combination of multiple Exadata storage servers, database servers, and network switches pre-configured and hooked together in a rack. The Database Machine is the whole system, but its frequently referred to as "Exadata" since that's a more unique brand.
Typically applications "ask" the database a question in the form of a SQL query, like "who are all my customers in Texas?" To answer this question, the database server asks the storage for all the data in a table, then does comparisons to find the matching records. There are two big benefits of using Exadata storage servers. First, they are intelligent so they will do the comparisons and return only matching records. That reduces the load on the database server and the network that connects them. Second, Exadata storage servers use flash technology, which is faster than disks and cheaper than memory.
The Database Machine simplifies implementations because the storage, database servers, and networking are all included and optimized to work together. It uses Oracle Enterprise Linux and the Oracle 11gR2 database with RAC. Its also fully redundant and scalable. No big decisions, no expensive consultants, no arguments over configurations.
Oracle Retail plans to benchmark both our data warehouse and transactional applications on Exadata and measure the performance gains. The retail industry is in desperate need of ways to increase performance while reducing costs, and I expect this "systems" approach will yield awesome results. Stay tuned.
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Comments (3)
Do you think this will open the Oracle Infrastructure certification a little bit more? Because, you know, right now Oracle is strict in which Database version supports for Retail version 12 and 13, and that is 10gR2, for Retail 13.1 it supports 11gR1, and now you are mentioning 11gR2...I hope it happens.
-Ramon Caballero
Posted by Ramon Caballero | November 1, 2009 4:57 PM
Posted on November 1, 2009 16:57
Ramon, its too costly to test and certify all the possible combinations of database, appserver, and OS so we tend to choose one stack that represents the latest release. We typically are not on the absolute latest because of scheduling, but we're almost always on the next-to-latest version.
When we certify on a particular DB, that doesn't mean other versions won't work. We just didn't take the time to prove it one way or the other. Regardless of the underlying technical platform chosen, we still support the applications -- we just require the ability to duplicate any issue on our reference stack. (We can't fix something we can't duplicate, right?)
Thanks for your comment.
Posted by David | November 2, 2009 8:37 AM
Posted on November 2, 2009 08:37
Hola David,
Of course, I understand the cost and the timing taken for certifications, I mean since Oracle Applications 9 and Oracle7 and all the way to ORetail 13.1 and Oracle11gR1 and I do not expect all combinations (only the latest and greatest j/k! ); but this article is about an out-of-the-box hardware with everything inside, if this box comes with 11gR2 and it says Oracle Retail is testing, I would expect as an obvious step for Oracle to put a stamp to these new versions.
The other possible option is that ORetail is testing on a current certified combination (11gR1) with this new hardware, but that doesn't seem too logical to me.
I get your last point, but for an implementation perspective we should not recommend versions that are not "fully" supported, as you know sometimes there are issues that are really hard to reproduce and the cost and time to have a certified environment just for that is too much, so we go by recommending what Oracle has tested throughly.
I just tried to get a glimpse to future certifications :) or at least a kind of plan.
We will see when the first Exadata for Retail appears, I am eager to "open" it! :D
Saludos,
-Ramon Caballero
Posted by Ramon Caballero | November 18, 2009 7:54 AM
Posted on November 18, 2009 07:54