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Last Friday (September 26), Paul Vallée and I were lucky enough to interview Kevin Closson about the Oracle Exadata Storage Server. A tidied-up stream of the audio is here: closson-interview.m3u.

The audio quality is a little spotty here and there, so you might like to follow the transcription below.

Paul gets the interview started.

Paul Vallée (PV): Christo Kutrovsky and myself, Paul Vallée. We’re on the line with Kevin Closson of Oracle (and prior to that with Hewlett-Packard, and prior to that with Polyserve, and prior to that with Sequent). A giant of our industry, and I’m honoured to be speaking to him. Kevin, hello.

Kevin Closson (KC): Well, they always say that flattery gets you nowhere, but apparently it’ll get you on the phone.

PV: [laughs] Very nice!

KC: No seriously, it’s more than a pleasure to be here. I like what you guys do, so this is good.

PV: Thank you, Kevin. So, we are here to talk about the work that Larry Ellison announced yesterday, specifically the work around the Oracle Database Machine and the Exadata Storage Server. Kevin, can you just quickly introduce yourself and how you came to be involved in the project?

KC: Right. So, I’m a performance architect with Oracle, and the project that I’m stationed on, if you will, is the development team for Oracle Exadata Storage Server. And the way I came to Oracle is, quite a few of the folks who are involved with the very genesis of Exadata are people that I’ve known and worked with closely dating back to the early ’90s. And after a fruitful endeavour as the chief software architect for Oracle solutions at Polyserve, it became an opportunity to latch onto Oracle, because we sold our company to them. So there we are.

PV: How exciting! Congratulations! So I noticed that there’s still a little, I guess a diversion in terms of the branding. Larry definitely introduced it as the Exadata Programmable Storage Server, and I double-checked the video. But in your blog, you’re calling it, for sure, just the Exadata Storage Server. Just how recently was the marketing/messaging developed for this?

KC: You know, I’m not a part of the Go-To-Market (GTM) efforts, but, you know, honestly, the way these things are brought to market . . .  They’re developed under a project name, and the project name remains the same for years. It was over the last few months that Marketing began cooking the name and what-have-you. Now, if you’re referring to something that Larry said in his keynotes, I have to admit I didn’t commit to photographic memory all the slides. And certainly, if he used the term “programmable”, I’m not going to correct Larry Ellison.

PV: [laughs] That would be risky.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

On Darrin Leboeuf’s advice, I loaded Kevin Closson’s blog, and sure enough, he had something ready to publish.

It must have been KILLING Kevin to keep this a secret. It must be a huge load off to publish this thing.

Anyway, Christo has been assigned to study this in detail and digest it overnight. Expect some good analysis tomorrow.

So, here is Kevin’s post publishing some technical details.

Cheers,
Paul

P.S. I am sure this is the future direction of storage intelligence. The fact that Oracle is setting the bar to only formatting half the disks in order to satisfy the IO saturation of the bandwidth will set a new bar. Do you know how hard we work to convince customers to do this (and fail!?) That, and the connection to BAHD and the problems I laid out in that article are obvious, this approach sets a new bar and addresses all of those issues.

Christo, by the way, is willing to bet this is a full-blown Oracle instance running on each Exabyte Storage Server. Interesting idea. From a manageability point of view, this is mind-boggling but possible.

I’m sorry if everyone else knew this already, but I just noticed the following from the Live Keynote page (click on Larry’s keynote to see it):

So Larry will be joined on stage by bigwigs from HP.

You will remember that HP bought Polyserve, Kevin Closson’s clustered file systems company, a little while back.

No coincidence, I think, but as we know from multiple sources, Kevin is now at Oracle as an Architect on this new technology that Larry is announcing.

At first I thought the HP keynote was one of those big-pay vendor closers. But now, with it being one session in the Live View, and what we’re starting to learn about the likely nature (storage) of the innovation, the following snippet can easily be re-interpreted (interesting bit in my bold):

Transforming Business and Technology Today and Tomorrow
Innovation is the lifeblood of information technology, but businesses are far more selective today in the kinds of technology they will buy and deploy to ensure they remain competitive. They’re looking for practical innovation that will optimize business results such as lowering IT costs, reducing risk and improving growth and profitability. Come learn about HP’s customer-focused innovation, including investments in research, product development and advanced services that have increased energy efficiency, provided new approaches to datacenter transformation, and also given us new advances in internet technology that are shaping the future of enterprise IT. Also highlighted: the joint innovation that HP and Oracle are delivering to their customers around the world.

Ann Livermore | Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, HP | Biography [+/-]
Mark Hurd | Chairman of the Board and CEO, HP

The pieces are coming together. Stay tuned as I will be writing further about this as the keynote begins.

Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we know so far?

• Starting with the obvious, Larry’s keynote is “Extreme Performance”, so it’s related to performance.
• We know Kevin Closson has worked on it – he had a blog entry saying “I am working on something big” that got pulled off the web. (Here’s Google’s cache.)

Given these two point, let’s further think about it. What do we know about Kevin?

• He worked for PolyServe — a company whose main product is a cluster file system.
• He worked for Sequent on NUMA systems, which in today’s world is pretty close to cluster software with a very fast, low latency interconnect.
• He is an expert in storage systems and disk performance.
• He joined Oracle recently, possibly to work on this secret project.
• He must be really excited about it, to post anything on his blog under radio silence.

I think it’s something related to storage, something new and revolutionary about storage. But what?

We already know, from leaks on certain websites, that ASM will become a cluster filesystem which will allow storing OCR files, as well as user files, on the ASM disks.

But is this big enough? It’s definitely significant. Now you get a “free” reliable, cluster file system with Oracle. I don’t think it’s big enough though. Oracle already had OCFS and OCFS2. So it’s not something new to release a filesystem. And even if ASM becomes a true filesystem, that would not provide such a significant performance boost to warrant a keynote called “Extreme Performance”. An ASM filesystem would be a major manageability feature, not so much a performance feature.

That being ruled out, what could it be?

Recently, when setting up a new 11g database on a server with 128gb of RAM, I was setting up hugepages as usual, and thinking about how big my cache would be. It struck me that the cache will be bigger than the database for quite a while. Why do we even need the SAN/Datafiles?!

Then it hit me.

Read the rest of this entry . . .