Oracle Exadata Database Machines

Oracle is now promoting their new database on steroids solution. Its called Exadata database machines.  Its a complete system by itself.  Exadata machine a.k.a Oracle Database Machine includes  Oracle Enterprise RAC servers,  Exadata storage server and SAN storage, all of which are installed and pre configured.  According to Oracle, all you have to do it provide power, network connectivity,  go through few settings, start up the instance , copy the data onto this and off you go.   Exadata is not a simple solution and hence not a cheap solution, its on the pricey side.   If your business require extreme throughput and has lot of data, its definitely worth looking at the Exadata solution. Another opportunity for it is server consolidation. You might be able to consolidate few oracle instances to an exadata server thus reducing the overall cost of your IT.   Lets dive a little bit deeper.
Oracle combines this database technology with Sun and came up with an architecture that optimized the database with the i/o technology.  The hardware is designed to be Oracle database friendly and the storage software is designed to be Oracle database and hardware friendly, so the result : A screaming machine !
Exadata server comes in three flavors:  Quater Rack :  Half Rack :  Full Rack .  With each step the processing power and i/o throughput doubles.  Here is a quick snapshot of different configurations :

Each of these needs at a minimum of Oracle Database 11g R2 EE,  Oracle RAC and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software. And these softwares are licensed apart from the hardware, so beware of the total sticker price. I will warn you its pretty eye-popping !
The operating system is however Oracle Enterprise Linux, which is basically Red Hat Linux that Oracle optimized for the Oracle database.

The technology of course is pretty interesting, one of the key factor is “magic” of the Exadata storage software : the storage server eliminates the need for traditional indexes as it keeps its own hash indexes on a 1MB block level at the storage server. So what does it mean, well, when the database server gets a query it sends the predicates to the storage server which uses its hash indexes to find the data and pass the data back to the database server which then can do the calculations or functions against it and send the data to the application. This  ensures that only relevant data is passed to the database server through the infiniband switches.

According to the Exadata experts the DBAs can hide (invisible) all the non primary / unique indexes or can even drop them. This saves wasted optimizing time and of course space.  The flash cache ofcourse makes the data hits scream.  The SGA and data cache is now totally maintained at the Exadata Smart Cache thus exponentially increasing the overall IOPS of the system.  The Exadata storage software also allows you to use Hybrid Columnar Compression, which is another way to increase the throughput of the system.  The solution is fully redundant.

Oracle lets you upgrade from quarter rack to half rack or a full rack, but again its not cheap.  The only gotcha I’ve seen is you cannot simply add storage to the solution, you need to by exadata servers and software and might also need to buy additional database servers depending upon your storage requirement. So when you budget your system, ensure that you forecast your growth thoroughly.
The solution again is not for everybody, if you have a small to medium size IT shop, you probably wouldn’t need an Exadata machine not because you cannot use it, but because it will be too much to justify the cost.  If your i/o throughput requirement and the amount of data that you deal with is in multi TB, then you may have an opportunity to look one of these machines.  Oracle needs to bring down the price of these machines or softwares required to run these machine.  These solutions can easily run you from $750 K and up (hardware and software).  Take a look at the price list from Oracle. Between the time I started writing this article and reach this point, Oracle has made another addition to its Exadata family : a 8 x 8 core machine with 2 TB RAM and 5.4 TB Flash Cache. Now thats extreme !
To read more into Oracle Exadata Database Machine, visit this link