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Comparing Oracle Database Appliance and Exadata

Written by Pythian Marketing | Sep 21, 2011 4:00:00 AM

Introduction

Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is in many ways similar to an Exadata quarter rack: they both use two similar compute servers in an engineered system configuration, with shared storage and flash storage. But in other ways, especially networking and storage, they differ significantly. In particular:

  • Storage connectivity: ODA uses SAS direct attachment, while Exadata uses an InfiniBand backbone connected to dedicated storage servers
  • Flash memory: Exadata has significantly more flash memory than ODA does. While both can store ASM diskgroups in flash, Exadata also has flash cache capability. ODA’s default configuration uses flash to store redo logs; this helps compensate for ODA’s lack of
    battery-backed disk write cache in the latency-sensitive redo write workload.
  • Expandability: ODA currently comes in a single 2-server, 12TB configuration. An Exadata quarter-rack configuration has
    2 compute servers and a minimum of 21TB raw storage. Both compute capacity and storage are expandable virtually without limit, given sufficient number of racks and network backbone.

The chart below summarizes the similarities and differences:

  ODA Exadata X2-2
Number of compute servers 2 2
Server type X4370 M2 X4170 M2
Compute node expansion None Exadata half rack
OS OEL 5.5 OEL 5.5
Flash size 292G 1152G
Flash type MLC SLC
Flash usage ASM diskgroup Flash cache or ASM diskgroup
Database version 11gR2 11gR2
Cluster interconnect 2xGigE using Oracle Redundant Interconnect InfiniBand, active-passive
Raw speed 2gbps 40gbps
External connectivity (per server) 2x10GigE, 4xGigE 2x10GigE, 4xGigE
Drive type 600G SAS 600G or 2TB SAS
Number of drives 20 36
Raw shared disk capacity 12TB 21.6TB (high speed) or 72TB (high capacity)
Storage expansion None Exadata half rack or additional storage servers
Local storage 2x500G SATA 4x300G SAS
RAM 96 GB/server 96 GB/server
CPU 2xX5675 3.06Ghz/server 2xX5675 3.06Ghz/server
Cores 6/processor 6/processor
Storage access SAS Oracle IDB over InfiniBand
Battery-backed write cache None 512m/storage server

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