Exadata X5 – A practical point of view of the new hardware and licensing
Oracle recently announced its latest iteration of Exadata – X5-2. It includes a refresh of the hardware to the most recent Xeon® E5-2699 v3 CPUs. These new CPUs boost the total cores count in a full rack to 288. This is higher than the current 8 socket “big machine” version X4-8, which has only 240 cores. But the most exciting part is the all flash version of Exadata. In the previous generation - X4 - Oracle had to switch from 15K drives to 10K drives in order to boost capacity from 600 GB to 1200 GB per hard drive to keep disk space higher than flash cache size. At that time of X4 announcements, we were already wondering why Oracle was still offering high-speed disks and not switching to all flash, and now we know why. Because that type of high-performance flash wasn’t quite ready. Maintaining high IO rates over long periods of times needed some changes to the ILOM in order to maintain cooling fans speed based on many individual temperature sensors inside the flash cards ( details). Removing the SAS controller and using the new NVMe connectivity resulted in much higher bandwidth per hard drive - 3.2 GBytes/sec vs. the old 1.2 GBytes/sec SAS. With temperature and bandwidth sorted out, we now have a super-high performance option (EF – Extreme Flash) for Exadata which delivers the stunning 263 GB/sec uncompressed scan speed in a full rack. The difference in performance between the High Capacity and High Performance EF flash option is now much higher. The high-performance option in Exadata X5 is now viable. In Exadata X4 it made so little difference, that it was pointless.
![x4 vs x5](https://static.hsstatic.net/BlogImporterAssetsUI/ex/missing-image.png)
- 1/8th rack, with 2 compute nodes
- 8 cores enabled per compute node (16 total)
- 256 GB RAM per node (upgradable to 768 GB per node)
- 3 storage servers with only half the cores, disks and flash enabled
- Extreme Memory – more compute nodes with max RAM, reduced licensed cores
- Extreme Storage – replace compute node with storage nodes, reduced licensed cores
![x5 custom](https://static.hsstatic.net/BlogImporterAssetsUI/ex/missing-image.png)
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