Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 2, 2011
I was just looking at an Exadata X2-2 ordering document and noticed that it included 144GB of RAM. The sales rep pointed at the Exadata X2-2 datasheet and showed the 96GB to 144GB memory expansion option. Based on my reading of Intel Xeon (Nehalam) memory configurations, as long as each channel has a single dual-ranked module, all the memory can run at full 1333MHz speed. (Update: as noted in the comments, this is unfortunately not the case in Exadata; with the expansion unit memory runs at 800MHz). It populates the normally-empty third socket for each memory bank with an additional memory module.
It isn’t particularly cheap: $6250 per database node at US list price, but is a performance booster that doesn’t have ongoing support costs either. For OLTP environments, I like to say cache is still king, and even for those of you with pure data warehouses, 50% more PGA space can help out your sorts too.
And yes, I realize this isn’t particularly new; according to Kerry Osborne’s blog it came out (but wasn’t officially announced per se) at the same time as the storage expansion racks in the summer
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Sep 30, 2011
PYTHIAN NEWS
Pythian and Scalar Decisions today announced a formal partnership providing Oracle customers an unparalleled one-stop shop solution provider in Canada. Combined, we can help Oracle customers develop, fulfill, implement, and manage their whole Oracle solution stack.
Posted by Marc Fielding on Nov 26, 2010
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control monitoring plug-ins for Exadata have been released. This is great news for Exadata users, since important components like InfiniBand switches previously had no direct monitoring. The plug-in bundle includes five separate monitoring plugins:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Nov 17, 2010
I just got an Exadata Customer Advisory e-mail from Oracle, identifying “an important issue that needs your immediate attention” and pointing to MOS note 1265396.1.
Note 1265396.1 talks of an issue with disk controllers in Exadata storage servers declaring false disk failures. In some “rare cases”, multiple such false failures occur at the same some, potentially causing data loss.
The issue applies to Sun (V2) database machines only, not the HP V1 or database machines or with the newer X2-2/X2-8 database servers.
The only fix is to upgrade to the newly-released version 11.2.2.1.1 of the storage server software. A combination of an upgrade and manually forcing disks back online at the disk controller and ASM levels can “bring back” the data in case of loss, assuming the disks haven’t been physically removed of course.
The 11.2.2.1.1 patch will run on any 11.2.0.1+ databases, though either 11.2.0.2 or 11.2.0.1 plus bundle patch 6 is recommended. If the database patches are in place, the storage server patch can be applied in a rolling fashion without downtime.
Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 8, 2010
Welcome to the third installment of a series describing the Oracle Exadata platform. In part 1 we talked about hardware components, and in part 2 went on to discuss software. We now move on to how these components are packaged and licensed.
Unlike version 1 of the Oracle database machine, which was sold in full-rack increments only, version 2 introduces the concept of half and quarter rack configurations for smaller products. All database machines include a full-size physical rack for equipment, networking equipment including two redundant InfiniBand fabrics, the Cisco administrative switch, a KVM management unit, and power distribution units.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Jul 6, 2010
Pythian has full-featured Oracle Exadata Services complete with successful implementations and reference customers.
When Oracle first introduced Exadata at OpenWorld 2008, it was aimed squarely at the data warehouse market dominated by Teradata, Netezza, and other pure-play vendors. Version 2, introduced a year later, has expanded the scope to include general-purpose mixed and even pure transaction processing workloads. Marketing claims abound with reports of 10x and faster speed improvements.
In this series of articles (part 2 here and part 3 here), we’ll explore the major components of Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine and take a peek at how they’re designed with performance and scalability in mind.
Going against the industry trend of embedding database-specific logic in hardware, Exadata makes use of commodity off-the-shelf hardware components, with an underlying open source operating system stack. While arguably such a common hardware architecture makes it easier for competitors to copy functionality, it also gives Exadata a well-understood, stable, and tested platform that’s constantly evolving higher speeds and capacities.
Database nodes
The database nodes in an Oracle Database Machine will be familiar to anyone who has worked with Oracle RAC in a Linux/x86 platform. They consist of exactly the same Sun Fire x4170 1U servers sold for general-purpose computing, but come maxed out in terms of configuration: Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 14, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.
Operating Systems
It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 9, 2010
Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.
Operating Systems
It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.
Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 2, 2010
Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.
Operating Systems
So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Bill Fraser on Apr 23, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!
Operating Systems
Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Read the rest of this entry . . .
