Introducing Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M

More Compute, Storage, and Faster Networking at the Same Price

The world’s fastest public cloud database platform is now even faster. Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M runs database workloads dramatically faster with extremely low 19 microsecond latency for SQL reads, up to 87% more SQL IOPS for OLTP, and 80% faster analytic scans.  All powereed by 2.5x more database cores, 28% more storage, and 2x the bandwidth to application server clients than the X8M and at the same price! 

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M offers extreme scale out capabilities that benefit both Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Service. With more compute, storage, and networking resources in the latest generation platform, customers can consolidate even more mixed database workloads on less infrastructure. The granular scalability of Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M also lowers costs by enabling customers to start with smaller configurations and right-size their hardware configuration to match their growing workload requirements.

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M delivers the following improvements for organizations running mission-critical databases in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

As a result, organizations can run OLTP workloads up to 22.4 M IOPS in a configuration with only 8 database servers and 12 storage servers while analytics and machine learning workloads can achieve up to 540GB/sec of scan throughput in the same configuration. This allows customers to run the same workloads faster and at lower costs, run larger workloads and more complex analyses in the same amount of time, and run more workloads on the same infrastructure.

If organizations need additional infrstructure to support their workloads, they can independently scale the number of database servers and storage servers they utilize. When fully scaled out with 32 database servers and 64 storage servers, Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M allows customers to run any type of workload at impressive scale and with impressive performance, effectively meaning that no workload or database is too large to run.

Exadata Smart System Software

With Exadata we combine the best compute, storage, networking, and system software available and build a scale-out engineered system specifically architected to run the Oracle Database. Exadata uses state-of-the-art hardware components, but since Exadata is built using the same industry standard components available to any vendor, what makes Exadata special? Simple, it’s the smart software we build into the system. Exadata includes dozens of enhanced software features and algorithms that, when combined with the hardware, provide superior performance, scalability, availability, and security for OLTP, Analytics, and Consolidation.

Exadata uses these smart technologies across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and OCI deployments, making it unique not just in its capabilities but also by having consistent and compatible capabilities with all deployment models. Exadata Cloud Infrastructure and Exadata Cloud@Customer run the same database services – Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Service – making it easy for organizations to develop once and deploy anywhere or move workloads between different locations. The power of the core Exadata platform is combined with cloud operations, automation, and cloud-based economics to eliminate infrastructure management, simplify or eliminate database administrations tasks, and reduce TCO.

Next-generation Exadata Infrastructure in OCI

For those of you interested in all the specifics for how the CPU, storage, and networking resources improved so dramatically over the previous X8M generation, here’s a summary of the Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M Data Sheet.

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M Database Server:

• 126 AMD EPYC™ Processor cores
• 1.35 TB Memory
• 50 Gbps Network (Client/Backup)

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M Storage Server:

• 48 Intel® Xeon® Processor cores
• 1.5 TB Intel® Optane™ PMem
• 25.6 TB NVMe Flash
• 63.6 TB Usable Disk Capacity

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M increases the throughput over its 100 Gbps active-active Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) internal network fabric, providing more bandwidth than previous generations and an extremely low-latency interconnect between all compute and storage servers. The servers now use PCIe4 to enable the full 200 Gbps aggregate bandwidth of the active-active RoCE fabric.

Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M runs Exadata Database Service, where infrastructure is managed by Oracle and the customer has control over most aspects of their database service. This provides customers with an easy path to migrate applications to the cloud by using the same Exadata capabilities available on premises but without having to modify operational procedures.

We continue to develop new software capabilities for Exadata Database Service running in the cloud. These include the following recent cloud automation capabilities that make it even easier to use.

• Scale and right-size configuration with elastic compute and storage provisioning and expansion
• Easily setup standby using Cloud UI or APIs
• Deploy, start, stop, delete, and clone Pluggable Databases from the UI and APIs
• Easily deploy customer specific fixes across multiple systems with custom database home images
• Centrally manage encryption keys with OCI Vault
• Monitor database Performance with built in Performance Hub and Metrics Screens

Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure

For Autonomous Database running on Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, there are additional benefits. Not only do you get the 87% greater IOPS and 80% higher throughput available with the Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M starting configuration, but you also have access to granular compute and storage expandability that allows organization to right-size their configurations to match their workloads. As a result, Autonomous Database customers can now take advantage of the full Exadata Cloud Infrastructure expandability. This effectively provides Autonomous Database with up to 40x more processor cores, 16x more memory, 27x more storage capacity, and 38x more scan throughput than the previous limit for X8M infrastructure.

Autonomous Database is the simplest cloud database service for running any type of application at any scale or with any level of criticality. When running it on dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, organizations can run all types of database workloads faster, eliminate human error and most database administration tasks, and automatically scale database consumption in consolidated environments to minimize costs.

Here are some recent software enhancements for Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure:

• Automatic Failover to Data Guard Standby Database
• Bring Your Own Key to Autonomous Data Guard using OCI Vault for Cross Region key management
• Integration with Database Management Service to manage full database fleet from one console
• Save costs for small databases and dev/test with by running up to 10 databases on 1 OCPU
• GoldenGate change capture is now available to implement replication and data mesh architectures

Getting Started

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is available globally. You can try it out with little investment as we allow you to provision a system for as little as 48 hours. With a database platform uniquely engineered for extreme performance, simplified management, low operating costs and reduced risks, Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is the best public cloud database platform available.

More details are available at www.oracle.com/exadata

*For more information on comparisons to AWS RDS and Azure SQL, please click here.