Global Industry Analyst Perspectives on Oracle Exadata Exascale

July 9, 2024 | 7 minute read
Michael Brown
Senior Director, Product Marketing, Oracle
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Oracle today introduced the next-generation Exadata Exascale cloud, the world’s only intelligent data architecture for cloud. This revolutionary new approach lets organizations of all sizes take advantage of the high performance and availability of Exadata for workloads of any scale.

Virtualized database server resources and the Exascale intelligent storage cloud enable customers to start out with small configurations with only a few ECPUs and 300 gigabytes of storage, reducing the starting price for optimized Exadata infrastructure in OCI by up to 95% and enabling online, incremental growth to meet changing Oracle Database processing and storage needs. Customers can immediately start to innovate using all Oracle Database 23ai features, including AI Vector Search, JSON Relational Duality, Globally Distributed Database with Raft replication, as well as AI Smart Scan and other new capabilities provided with Oracle Exadata System Software 24ai. Developers can use these new capabilities in conjunction with Exadata Exascale’s ability to instantly create efficient database clones from read-write sources to accelerate the development of innovative applications.

Leading industry analysts from around the world had the following remarks on the introduction of Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure:

 The Futurum Group

“Exascale unites the best of Exadata with the best of the cloud. The result is the world's only intelligent, mission-critical data architecture for the cloud. Customers get a highly-performant, economical infrastructure for their Oracle databases with hyper-elastic resources. Oracle Exascale greatly expands market reach as the low cost now makes Exadata attractive to small organizations and the low entry configuration makes small workloads affordable to everyone. It’s a win-win for both, powered by key technologies such as RDMA for low latency and high throughput.”

—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, The Futurum Group

 

Omdia

“When you think of Exadata, you think of mission-critical, high performance data management solutions, something tailored to Fortune 100 customers. With Oracle's new Exadata Exascale solution, the company is now offering the same Exadata capabilities—the highest Oracle Database performance, availability, and scalability—in a small and affordable configuration that can cost up to 95% less,” said Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI and Data Analytics, Omdia. “With this new offering, customers can start with just a few ECPUs and pay only for what they use. Basically, in delivering hyper-elastic scaling and pay-per-use economics, Oracle now allows even the smallest organizations and the smallest workloads to gain all of the benefits found in Exadata. In a nutshell, this new service is like getting the performance of a hyper car for the price of a commuter car, clearly a game changer for companies looking for room to grow.”

—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI & Data Analytics, Omdia

 

Moor Insights & Strategy

“Access to the latest database technologies has long been a challenge for smaller companies competing against much larger, established competitors with seemingly unlimited budget. From performance to seamless scale to agile operations, many of the cloud services available today are limiting in terms of enabling the absolute best of all of these functions. This dynamic limited the ability of smaller companies to deliver on faster performance, at scale on a fixed budget. With Oracle Exadata Exascale, Exadata-class performance has been democratized, enabling faster, more intelligent transaction processing, analytics, and AI vector compute and acceleration. All at a cost that is 95% lower than the Exadata Database Service employed by the largest banks and insurance companies. Exadata Exascale can level the playing field by bringing Wall Street capabilities to Main Street.”

Matt Kimball, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy

 

IDC

“The emphasis on data to drive enterprise success, especially in the age of AI, and broad-based movement of enterprise data to the public cloud suggest that there is an excellent opportunity, even a mandate, for a data infrastructure approach that takes maximum advantage of the dynamism and flexibility that the public cloud platform represents. This suggests a novel data architecture designed specifically for the cloud. Oracle has stepped up with Exadata Exascale. Oracle, of course, has well-established credibility in the database realm and a proven ability to execute on database demands and opportunities.  Its long-time mission-critical database system, Exadata’s high-performance, and the flexibility of Oracle’s gen 2 cloud infrastructure have enabled Oracle to deliver a comprehensive, intelligent data architecture that combines Exadata and cloud benefits with pay-per-use, a near-infinite resource pool, and hyper-elasticity affordable for any size organization. With Exascale, Oracle has put forth the challenge. Who will respond?”

—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC

 

KuppingerCole Analysts

“For over 15 years, Oracle Exadata has served as a top tier solution for businesses demanding the highest performance and availability for their database workloads. Now, Exadata Exascale finally allows any customer to start on Exadata infrastructure at their own pace and without the upfront cost of dedicated hardware, reducing the minimum monthly charges by more than 95%. Combining the best features of the Exadata architecture with the scale and elasticity of its cloud, Oracle makes the platform of choice for Fortune 500 enterprises accessible to everyone. Backed by the company’s strong investment in security, data protection, and regulatory compliance, Exascale is promising to deliver overall business value that’s unequalled in the industry.”

—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst, KuppingerCole Analysts

 

WinterCorp

“Oracle Database 23ai represents a potent combination of capabilities, the significance of which has increased further with the release of Exadata Exascale. Exascale advances the Exadata architecture with new features, lower entry costs, and extreme flexibility in configuration—what Oracle calls hyper-elasticity—effectively allowing the customer to use any combination of compute and storage in the cloud while scaling out and in, as needed. Exascale extends the architecture of Exadata to provide greatly increased freedom in configuring the relationship between compute and storage. This accommodates efficient configurations for a wide range of customer requirements. One customer may have a large volume of data and a light workload; another may have a heavy workload on a modest volume of data. For each of these situations—and for virtually any in between—Exascale allows the customer to configure an optimal ratio between compute and storage. Further, Exascale supports fine-grained elastic expansion and contraction of the resources configured as workloads fluctuate. Along with these capabilities, Exascale delivers the existing strengths of Exadata: high performance; excellent support for consolidation of multiple database workloads on a single system; and strong isolation of multiple tenants from one another, with respect to both workload and security issues. When compared to competitive offerings, Exascale clearly redefines the meaning of database cloud.”

—Richard Winter, CEO, WinterCorp

 

Constellation Research

“AI in clearly in CIOs’ agendas worldwide, as they are looking for new AI innovations for their mission-critical workloads at an economical price point. And Exadata Exascale delivers in this regard. Oracle Database 23ai AI Vector Search queries are transparently offloaded to smart Exascale storage and are automatically parallelized across the Exascale storage cloud for faster vector search. For users, this technology means up to 30x faster AI vector queries. If you’re dealing with an LLM and millions of internal documents, 30x faster means that you can answer customer queries in your support center in milliseconds and greatly improve customer satisfaction. With Exascale, you can get extreme vector performance for AI and all of your mission-critical workloads—regardless of scale—simultaneously.”

—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

 

NAND Research

“Oracle takes a giant leap forward in database cloud services with a unique combination of innovations in the Exadata Exascale architecture. First, intelligent software that optimizes for OLTP, analytics, and AI Vector Search. Second, hardware-based RDMA that eliminates any delays introduced by processors and the OS. Third, with AI Smart Scan, SQL and vector processing are offloaded to storage servers where the data actually is. This is the secret sauce that delivers industry-leading low latency and very high throughput, which together with pay-per-use, lower costs for customers—obviously time is money in the cloud—and makes this a rather attractive value proposition for organizations of any size or vertical industry.”

—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst and Founding Partner, NAND Research

 

 theCUBE Research

“In the midst of baseball season, Oracle has been hitting home run after home run. First with Oracle Database 23ai, then with HeatWave GenAI. Now with Exadata Exascale, Oracle has hit a grand slam. Oracle has taken the power of Oracle Database 23ai, its unmatched database convergence, AI Vector Search, GenAI integration, and the incomparable performance of Exadata and turned it into the definitive cloud accessible pay-per-use tool for the 21st century. They have made this powerful system available and affordable for everyone ranging from small organizations to hyperscale ones. There is truly nothing else even close to it in the cloud market.”

—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, theCUBE Research

“Exadata Exascale is impressive, providing a hyper-elastic, multi-tenant cloud, offering all the industry-hardened Exadata benefits at a price point that SMBs worldwide can afford—as little as $357 a month. By taking advantage of the only RDMA-capable storage cloud that I’m aware of, Exascale can put to work thousands of CPUs from a shared pool of cloud compute and storage to accelerate all database workloads at a low cost. You can tell how much thought went into this new architecture by looking carefully at the GenAI optimizations, as Oracle’s AI vector search can be transparently offloaded to Exascale storage for faster search and vector search queries are automatically parallelized across the Exascale storage cloud.”

—Rob Strechay, Managing Director, theCUBE Research.

 

dbInsight

“Exascale dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for Exadata by bringing the best of both worlds: The mission-critical performance of the modern Exadata architecture for mixed workloads with the economics of the multitenant cloud. With Exascale, customers get the same benefits that Exadata brings to mission-critical workloads, such as AI SmartScan and SQL offload to smart storage, on the same high-performance RDMA architecture. And because this is multitenant, they can start quite small with as few as a couple cores per VM, making Exadata practical for small or midsize enterprise, or departmental workloads.”

—Tony Baer, Principal, dbInsight

 

For more information on Exadata Exascale:

 

Michael Brown

Senior Director, Product Marketing, Oracle

Michael is a seasoned product marketing and product management director with experience in real-time systems, high performance computing, graphics, storage, and databases. He currently manages the Oracle Exadata Cloud and Engineered Systems product marketing team. Michael holds an MBA from Wharton, an MSEE from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and both a BS in Engineering and BA in Philosophy from Swarthmore College.

 

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