Exadata V2 Surprises
When Oracle announced the Exadata V2 database appliance late last year, it created quite a stir. The performance numbers for the box are extremely high, and the feature set and capacity are quite large.
Last week we had an executive briefing for folks interested in Exadata V2. My colleagues Kurt Rosenfeld and John Laferrier presented information on business intelligence and the Exadata, as well as the business case and use cases for considering buying one. Joe LaFlamme from Oracle presented some reference customer examples.
I presented the Exadata V2 technical overview, traveling through the architecture details, migration strategies, and component details. Along the way there were a few points I made that seemed a bit surprising to the audience, and that led to a lively discussion. I summarize those points here, as they do not seem to be well known within the industry.
- Existing Oracle licenses are transferable to Exadata (including Oracle DB, RAC, and Partitioning). That can greatly reduce the cost of an Exadata that is being used for database consolidation, for example.
- The Exadata looks to be an excellent consolidation engine. Included with the Exadata software are resource management tools that can, for example, give some databases resource priority over others. These tools also allow the use of the flash storage to be fine tuned, pinning specific tables into flash or letting Oracle use the flash as an extended cache.
- The Exadata V2 is designed to be able to perform OLTP and Data Warehouse transactions concurrently. If a single system can be used both ways, consider the implications compared to stand-alone, separate Data Warehouse solutions. Normally data must be extracted from the OLTP system, copied to the DW system, imported there, and then processed. The extraction and copying are overhead, on both the OLTP and DW systems. And, any reports or queries on the DW system are performed against “stale data” – data from the time the extraction started. Now consider being able to do DW operations against live, current OLTP data. And according to the performance numbers published by Oracle, those operations could run much faster than on most DW systems. That speed could result in completing more complex reports, the allowing of more ad hoc queries, and so on. Such a change could be a fundamental advantage to DW consumers (finance and senior management, for example).
- Consider the cost of Oracle database software licenses. Now consider the hardware on which they run. Increasing the performance of that software gains your site more database performance at the same database license cost. The Exadata V2 is optimized to run OLTP and Data Warehouses, very quickly. The resource management software included with the Exadata, and its use as a consolidation engine, probably leads to the appliance running with more databases using more resources and with less reserved headroom than having a non-Exadata database environment. That means that, for a given number of Oracle database licenses, your site would get more database performance.
- Customization of the pre-dedefined Exadata V2 configuration is allowed. For example, if your business need required fewer database engines and more storage it is possible to get such a configuration from Oracle. Also, some sites might want to use the included Infiniband interconnect for fast backup of the data. However, the support model for custom configurations is likely to be different than the pre-defined ones. At the moment, even splitting a full rack of Exadata V2 into two racks (to prevent the rack from being a single point of failure) is a custom configuration.
- You can’t build your own Exadata V2 system. Even though the hardware components of Exadata V2 are off-the-shelf Sun servers and networking, there is “magic sauce” in the Exadata. The Exadata storage software manages the storage nodes; the Exadata servers off-load storage-centric operations to the storage nodes (again increasing the database performance you get with those Oracle licenses); and “Hybrid Columnar Compression”, a new method for compressing columns of data while still making them available for OLTP access are Exadata V2-only features. Following the Oracle / Sun best practices and blueprints, and using the same hardware components, could lead to something similar to the Exadata V2 in terms of features and performance, but the lack of those features means that it will not match the features and performance of Exadata V2.
Unfortunately, the slide deck contains some proprietary and confidential information, and so cannot be posted here. But feel free to get in touch if you would like to know more about any of these aspects (or the Exadata V2 in general). Here are some links to further reading.
Larry Ellison introducing the Exadata V2
Exadata V2
Exadata V2 Datasheet
Exadata Storage Server
Exadata Support
Oracle Exadata Blog
Kevin Closson’s Blog
