Posted by Paul Vallee on Sep 24, 2008
Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Oracle Database Machine was announced.
It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.
You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.
Also, Alex Gorbachev posted his analysis of the Oracle Database Machine and that’s a worthy read with some new technical details.
You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.
I also separated out the Oracle Exadata Storage Server liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.
On with the liveblogging!
Second product announcement: The Oracle Database Machine (in partnership with HP).
Specs slides.
8 64-bit servers, 14 exadata storage servers, tons of ram.
Larry: “It will hold really a lot of songs”.
Three year development program.
Custormers:
Amazon, Yahoo, Countrywide, NPD, Quelle
M-Tel: a Bulgarian company, 10-72 times speedup. The worst speedup was 10x.
Alex G: “It’s mainframes!”
Larry: “Next slide”. Martin W: “why doesn’t he have the clicker himself!?”
Christo (a bulgarian) “I can’t believe M-Tel had this and managed to keep it a secret. That’s funny.”
28x P-Series competitive advantage at M-Tel. For half of one.
Darrin L: “Yeah but what’s the price difference. How do you license this!?”
Good questions IMHO. Oracle licenses based on server performance. There is a major problem to be solved there.
TPC-H query set. 30x average speed-up.
They have a paper describing it. Will be intersting to read it.
Christo: “This seems to be parallel-query only! It might be only for data warehouses!”
Larry: “With a conventional array, when you add storage, you don’t add data bandwidth. With this solution, every time you add storage server, you are adding not just disk capacity, but two infiniband pipes, two processors, and more cache”.
Makes Sense. Refer to BAHD again. Man I feel a bit smart right now.
Now bashing Teradata. I guess we’re into the advertising section.
Now Larry is saying how similar this is to Netezza. One processor per disk drive. Christo is saying it’s very similar.
Larry: two big differences:
1. our database machine runs oracle, theirs does not.
2. we lose a drive, ours keeps running, theirs does, their queries stop.
Christo “umm no they don’t they have three way mirroring”.
Great quip: “even I studied about B-Tree indexes in School!” LOL LOL
Slide – comparing vs. Netezza. Clearly this is the company they are targeting.
Oracle’s stuff is bigger and faster and has more cores and faster bandwidth.
Christo: “The question is, does that CPU sort.”
HP Oracle … 650,000 vs. 1.500,000 for Teradata system with less spec.
In the Oracle column, you need to pay the 1.7 mm software license.
Software license for Oracle though… 1.7mm. There is something interesting going on here.
“Even if you pay list for Teradata, it’s cheaper for capacity.”
Next slide……..
Will speed up OLTP as well as data warehousing.
Available today, 10-50x faster than current (in small type) oracle data warehouses”
I must have missed something. How is this not costing more than Teradata?
OK Christo explained, the Oracle system had triple the storage for modestly more cost.
Mark Hurd talking again. Can HP please hire somebody exciting? Maybe exciting is just not what they do.
Adds the fact that these storage servers are “completely open, proliant-based servers”.
I wonder how long this will be HP-only.
Next, I think you’ve listened to me for long enough, now take a moment and listen to this advertising interlude.
More to come.
