Pythian Group

It’s Sunday morning early in San Francisco and the biggest ever Oracle OpenWorld is about to start. It looks like it’s also going to be the busiest ever OpenWorld for me — my schedule looks crazy and I still need to do the slides for my Thursday sessions (one on ASM and one on cloud computing). Fortunately, my slides for today’s presentation are all ready to go.

OK. Don’t let me carry away — I started this post with the intention to write about what I expect Oracle to announce at this OpenWorld and it seems like the most important announcements happen at tonight’s keynote. I hasn’t been at the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so unlike them, all I can say is pure speculation-based and my wishes of what should be covered. Actually, unlike them, I actually CAN say at least something. :)

1. Oracle Exadata Database Machine v3 (x2-8) — well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody by now. I fully expect upgrade of the hardware — new Intel CPUs (probably with more cores), more memory, possibly more flash (this technology moves really quick these days). Maybe 10GbE network can be introduced to address some of the customers demands but I don’t think it’s needed that much. InfiniBand might just stay as it is — I think there is enough throughput but Marc Fielding noted that moving InfiniBand to the next speed level shouldn’t be very expensive. Other then cosmetic upgrade, I believe that hardware architecture will largely stay the same — it works very well, it’s proven and very successful. Maybe something should be done to let customers integrate Exadata better into their data-centers — folks keep complaining of inflexibility (and I think Oracle should stay firm on this and don’t let customer screw themselves up but who knows).
   On the software side, Read the rest of this entry . . .

In the era of consolidation, storage has not been left out. Different systems are made to share the same storage boxes, fiber-channel switches and networks. Inside a typical storage box, we have front-end and back-end controllers, cache, physical spindles shared amongst different applications, databases, backup destinations, and so on.

The impact of backup on normal database activity . . . batch processing in one database impacting transactional processing — these are two real life examples of the consequences of storage consolidation known to almost every DBA. Of course, it’s easy to suggest separating databases to different physical disks, but what about SAN box controllers and shared cache? And don’t forget about the cost factor and ubiquitous consolidation that forces storage administrators to pack as much data as possible into a single SAN or NAS storage device.

Some of our customers use hosting services — they outsource hardware hosting just like they outsource DBA work to Pythian. In such scenarios, hosting service providers usually have storage hardware shared amongst different customers to provide higher utilization and on-demand storage capacity at a lower cost.

Read the rest of this entry . . .