Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 is a rack-scale engineered system delivering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute, storage, and networking constructs for customers to consume on-premises. It enables rapid deployment of applications, middleware and workloads that are cloud-compatible via automation in an OCI-like environment while being disconnected from the public cloud. Private Cloud Appliance X10 can be paired with Oracle Exadata or Oracle Database Appliance to create an ideal infrastructure for scalable, multi-tier applications.
Private Cloud Appliance X10 Architectural Overview
The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 architecture integrates OCI compatible compute, storage and networking components in a rack form factor. Customers have the flexibility to expand their compute and storage independently assuring them of meeting their specific business needs and ensuring investment protection.
Private Cloud Appliance has no Single Point of Failure as it is designed from the ground up with resiliency in mind. Just like the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Private Cloud Appliance delivers a three fault-domain architecture that mirrors OCI to enhance availability alongwith 8 tenancies for customers to isolate and limit access to certain resources.
Private Cloud Appliance Hardware Components
The Private Cloud Appliance X10 system contains three management nodes and a minimum of three compute nodes, two Oracle ZS9-2 Storage Appliance heads, a minimum of one high-capacity storage tray, four 100GbE aggregation switches, and a management switch.
The Private Cloud Appliance rack also offers “Flex Bays”- a 4RU unit enabling users to add up to 2 compute node, 2 high-performance storage trays or 1 high-capcity storage tray.
Management Nodes
Management software comprising the Private Cloud Appliance ‘Service Enclave’, comprising of control plane and controller software, runs on three dedicated management nodes. A design pattern of Private Cloud Appliance X10 is to provide isolation of system and customer resources. Separating management nodes from customer compute nodes enhances robustness, security, and ensures that customer workloads and infrastructure processes do not compete for resources. Additionally, it fosters deterministic, repeatable performance for customer workloads.
The management nodes are arranged in a cluster to provide high availability and permit zero-downtime rolling upgrades. Management nodes are identical, so each can take on different parts of the management services and operate if a node is unavailable for maintenance or due to an outage.
Compute Nodes
Compute nodes provide the processing capacity to host compute instances (virtual machines) and are designated as the ‘Compute Enclave’. Private Cloud Appliance X10 has between 3 and 12 compute nodes based on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors offering up to 184 OCPUs per compute node. Customers can scale from 552 OCPUs to 2208 OCPUs in a single rack, with the option to expand to 6624 OCPUs in a multi-rack configuration.
A design feature of Private Cloud Appliance is to automatically configure compute nodes to reduce operational effort and time to value. Each compute node is automatically assigned to one of three Fault Domains (FD) which are used to provide application resiliency. Zero-downtime rolling upgrades can be used with compute nodes: sufficient installed capacity must be available to permit taking compute nodes temporarily out of service. Application instances are temporarily moved from a compute node placed in maintenance mode for the duration of the maintenance window. These instances are moved back when the maintenance is complete, and the node is available.
Compute Nodes run the KVM hypervisor, each instance is given its own dedicated RAM and OCPUs, thus protecting them from ‘noisy neighbor’ effects that may affect performance.
Storage
The primary storage resource is the Oracle ZS9-2 Storage Appliance, a high-performance storage subsystem building on the success of the ZFS product line and providing multi-protocol storage access in a highly available cluster. ZS9-2 capacity is used for object storage, customer compute images, and customer block storage. It also supports built-in replication, cloning, and encryption.
The ZS9-2 appliance has two server heads, each with two 24-core Intel Xeon processors and 1TB of RAM. As with the management and compute nodes, the ZS9-2 uses clustering to avoid single points of failure and permit zero-downtime maintenance and upgrades. The storage heads control access to high capacity and high-performance storage trays. Access is provided via iSCSI, NFS and SMB protocols.
The default storage is a single high-capacity storage tray providing over 150TB of usable storage after mirroring, checksum and RAID are accounted for. Between 1 and 20 high-capacity storage trays can be installed in a Private Cloud Appliance system, each with 20 22TB disk drives in a RAID configuration, along with SSD-based read and write cache accelerators. Storage can be scaled up to more than 3.65PB.
Optionally, between 1 and 20 high-performance trays can be configured, each with 20x 7.68TB SAS SSDs and 2 SSD write accelerators. The different storage tiers (high capacity and high performance) can be used to optimize total storage capacity and IOPS performance.
Additionally, each compute node comes with local SATA disks for boot. Management nodes also have NVMe SSD devices.
Network
Private Cloud Appliance X10 network architecture is based on the networking services provided in OCI. L3 networks, virtual cloud networks (VCNs) and subnets rely on high-speed physical infrastructure with separate data plane and management networks. As with compute and storage, networking uses design patterns of isolation and physical redundancy.
Data plane connectivity is built on redundant 100Gbit switches in two-layer design, similar to a leaf-spine topology. Leaf switches interconnect the rack hardware components, while the spine switches form the network backbone and provide a path for external traffic. Each leaf switch is connected to all the spine switches, which are also interconnected. The main benefits of this topology are resiliency, extensibility, and path optimization.
Private Cloud Appliance X10 provides comprehensive network services including L2/L3 virtual networking, IPv4, load balancing, firewalls, NAT, DHCP and DNS, local peering, Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG, a virtual router), Security Lists and Security Groups. North/South traffic uses OVN Distributed Gateways that place traffic from overlay networks (VCNs) onto the underlay network and then to uplinks on the spine switches to the datacenter. Internal network traffic (East/West) tunnels traffic through a single underlay network.
Summary
Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 is a rack-scale engineered system enabling customer to develop applications once and deploy anywhere – either in their data centers or the public cloud. With a wide range of configurations to choose from and the capability to expand compute and storage independently, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 is the ideal infrastructure for customers looking to have an OCI-like development and deployment experience while meeting their data residency requirements.
For more information, please visit the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 webpage and the datasheet.