- The Oracle MAA team has an excellent whitepaper on backup and recovery best practices for Exadata, recently updatedfor 11.2.0.2, at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/availability/maa-tech-wp-sundbm-backup-11202-183503.pdf. Integration into third-party backup infrastructures is fully supported, and works as for other ASM-based databases using RMAN media manager plugins. Oracle’s secure backup media manager requires additional licenses on a per-tape drive basis, and some third party vendors require addiitonal licenses for their RMAN media manager plugins.
- If you’re looking for speed and mjinimizing resource usage, consider putting an InfiniBand HCA in your backup server. THe IB backbone has much more capacity than a FC SAN.
- Exadata SQL syntax is the same as for other Oracle platforms, so using a regular non-Exadata development environemnt can be a viable option. You can of course place multiple instances (Dev/QA/Production) into a single Exadata system.
- There are plenty of performance results available online, and even on this blog. Any actual performance results depend on the application driving the load. There’s still no substitute for good old-fashioned benchmarking for your particular workload.

Marc

- has anyone explained so far what is the proper methodology for doing backups of data residing on an Exadata? Or how they feet into customers’ existing backup infrastructures? What needs to be changed, what is/isn’t supported (backup vendors) and finally what is the best practise for doing backups and whether one should expect additional costs here?

- no FC SAN in Exadata may be a problem. It mostly means no SAN-based/LAN-free backups, no direct attachmet for tape drives/libraries. I guess, that the only method of pumpuing the data out of Exadata rack will be TCP/IP (1G or 10G Ethernet). This is still not the same as SAN. Anybody willing to share the knowledge?

- will Oracle offer an Exadata-Mini-Edition for 1/10th of the price to allow customers to have their dev/test envs running on a fully compatible HW/SW or maybe Exadata could be purchased as a software-only solution to be deployed on commodity servers?

- let’s assume Exadata is 10x faster then a comparable bunch of disks + comparable high-end CPU/RAM power put toghether in a classic SMP_host-SAN-array manner. Will all applications be able to put enought pressure and generate enough parallelizm onto an Exadata engine to reach say 80% of its potential?

I don’t want to say Exadata is a poor product or a bad concept. It seems to be a really breakthrough technology, but as it is still in it’s childhood it has lots of areas that make the product/technology not mature. Best practises not clear. Final results unkown. TCO/ROI proved only on paper.

Regards,

I agree there are operational challenges, particularly with experience in support the new database machine, however I don’t agree with your points.

- RMAN is a great way of doing backups. And Exadata offers greatly improved incremental backups. Without RMAN backups of a 30-40 TB database would take forever.

- I am not sure what you mean by there are no SAN solutions?

- Dev and test do not have to be on exadata. QA has to be if you are benchmarking performance.

- No matter how finally tunned, exadata offers some unique features. Whether those are deal breakers is application specific, but once we go to Exadata size applications, building a balanced machine is the challenge. And it’s because there are too many departments involved and company policies limitations. Exadata solves all this by having a nicely build package.

- Assuming you are talking a datawarehouse reporting application, yes it has to be parallelised. OLTP is parallelised by the fact there are multiple users. And that’s normal, I don’t see the problem with this? There are no fast datawarehouse systems that do use some kind of parallelism.

- You have to agree there are various levels of RAC awareness. These matter more if you are more OLTP biased, and less if you are datawarehouse biased. And a RAC aware application, is just a well “tuned” application.

If the other port is used for failover, then the actual bitrate is 16Gb/s. IB is the only networking technology that advertises baud rate as opposed to say FC which also uses 8b/10b encoding but advertises for example 4Gb/s rather than 5 ;)

- Exadata cells are 2U in size
- Pricing – 1 680 000 is for license (added picture of slide)
- Corrected GB to Gbits
- Changed total bandwith as per Kevin’s comments