Pythian Group

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 . . .

For those of you who didn’t see the Larry Ellison’s keynote here it is courtesy to Sheeri.

We cut out the HP part but I don’t think anyone will complain. It’s not the best angle but we didn’t get there early in advance to secure the right location for the camera.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Pythian has a full-featured Oracle Exadata Practice complete with successful implementations and reference customers.

*Updated* see comments.
Exadata — the smart storage server. I am definitely excited about this product, but my point of view is a bit different.

It’s fast, and much faster than anything out there right now. But how many shops will actually need this? How many shops can spend 2.2 million dollars on hardware and equipment?

What are the products, in a nutshell? The Oracle Exadata Storage Server (Data Sheet, PDF):

• 2U Storage “unit” with either 1 TB SAS or 3.3 TB SATA redundant capacity. There is a query processor in the box that can “offload” tasks from the main database server. Primary filtering, decompression, joins, backups.
• Storage units linked to database servers via dual Infiniband offering 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GBytes/sec) bandwidth

The Database Machine (Data Sheet, PDF):

• A standard 42U rack with 8 database servers and 12 Exadata storage servers.
• Pre-installed Linux and Oracle. Pre-configured.
• In 8 servers — a total of 256GB RAM, 64 Intel cores @ 2.66 Ghz, InfiniBand-ed and gigabit-switched.

The cost for one Database Machine: $2.33M ($650,000 + $1,680,000 in software) as grabbed from Larry’s keynote (thank chet) I called the “call us now” phone mentioned on the Oracle Exadata website to ask them for pricing. They had no idea what I was asking about, and I’m still waiting on a salesperson to call me back. (Hint for Oracle — educate your sales staff about new products, just in case I decide to buy one the day after you announce it.)

You have to realize how “cheap” this is. It comes down to $25,000 per core for Oracle EE, RAC, and Partitioning! And extra “free” CPUs for decompressing, filtering and joining, and backups. That’s a good deal. Oh, did I mention you can interconnect several 42U racks?

Back to the main question, what problems does this product solve?

Read the rest of this entry . . .