Oracle Exadata II - OLTP Database Machine with SUN Hardware

Larry Ellison of Oracle unveils the Exadata Version 2: The First Database Machine for OLTP from Oracle using the SUN hardware. What does this mean for HP? It is the end of the HP Oracle Database Machine or the Exadata 1.

The Exadata Database Machine Version 2, made jointly by Oracle and SUN. It is pitched as the world's fastest machine for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP). Thus is meant for mixed mode loads. It is interesting that Larry, when announcing he Exadata I, last year said that OLTP system have 70% query load. Thus, Exadata 2, is a combination of faster query and write, to target the OLTP and hybtid loads on the large databases.

Exadata 2 uses the industry standard H/W components along with the FlashFire technology from Sun. The Exadata 2 requires Oracle 11g R2 and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software Release 11.2. Larry claimed that the Sun Oracle Database Machine Version 2 is twice as fast as Version 1 for data warehousing. Oracle (and HP) will no longer make the Exadata 1 now.

The Sun Oracle Database Machine now is not confined to data warehousing applications. The difference is the addition of Exadata Smart Flash Cache based on Sun FlashFire technology to deliver extreme performance and scalability for online transaction processing (OLTP). Thus you can now have say Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and your Oracle BI Data Warehouse, all on the same Exadata 2 and the new hardware can handle mixed workload.

Exadata Version 2 will be available in four models:
> full rack (8 database servers and 14 storage servers),
> half-rack (4 database servers and 7 storage servers),
> quarter-rack (2 database servers and 3 storage servers) and
> a basic system (1 database server and 1 storage server).

All four Exadata configurations are available immediately to the customers. Larry said that with the Sun Oracle Database Machine, Oracle customers can store more data and search data more than ten-times faster without making any changes to applications.

Here is the Hardware and Software stack for Exadata 2

Sun's FlashFire memory cards enable high performance OLTP
80% Faster CPUs - Intel Xeon (Nehalem) processors
50% Faster Disks - 600 GB SAS Disks at 6 Gigabits/second
200% Faster Memory - DDR3 memory
125% More Memory - 72 Gigabytes per database server
100% Faster Network - 40 Gigabits/second InfiniBand
Raw disk capacity of 100 TB (SAS) or 336 TB (SATA) per rack

Software from Oracle

Features the world's first flash-enabled database - Oracle 11g Release 2
Hybrid columnar compression for 10-50 times data compression
Scans on compressed data for even faster query execution
Storage Indexes to further reduce disk I/Os
Offloading of query processing to storage using Smart Scans
Smart scans of Data Mining models in storage servers
Applications running on the Sun Oracle Database Machine achieve up to 1 Million I/O Operations per Second to Flash Storage