Technical Overview of the Exadata Product Family

In the newly released 29-page white paper by Oracle, the company introduces the Exadata product family: Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server and Sun Oracle Database Machine. The paper examines the Exadata architecture and includes information on the database server software, enterprise manager plug-in for Exadata, software, smart scan processing, I/O resource management and accelerated performance with Exadata, and Exadata storage virtualization.

Exadata is a joint offering from Oracle and Sun. Sun is providing the hardware technology used in the Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server, while Oracle is providing the software.

The foundation of the Exadata product family is the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server. It is used as the storage for the Oracle Database when building custom database systems. The Sun Oracle Database Machine is a complete and fully integrated database system that includes Exadata storage.

Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server

Described as the storage building block of the Sun Oracle Database Machine, it runs the Exadata Storage Server software. Each Exadata cell or hardware component comes preconfigured with:

two Intel Xeon E5540 quad-core processors,
384 GB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache,
twelve disks connected to a storage controller with 512MB battery-backed cache,
24 GB memory,
dual port InfiniBand connectivity,
management interface for remote access,
dual-redundant hot-swappable power supplies,
all the software preinstalled, and
takes up 2U in a typical 19-inch rack.

The white paper states that the Exadata Smart Flash Cache provides a ten-fold improvement in response time for reads over regular disk; a hundred-fold improvement in IOPS for reads over regular disk; and is a less expensive higher capacity alternative to memory.

The Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server comes with either twelve 600 GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disks or twelve 2 TB Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks. SAS based Exadata Storage Servers provide up to 2 TB of uncompressed user data capacity, and up to 1.5 GB/second of raw data bandwidth. SATA based Exadata Storage Servers provide up to 7 TB of uncompressed user data capacity, and up to 0.85 GB/second of raw data bandwidth. When stored in compressed format, the amount of user data and the amount of data bandwidth delivered by each cell increases up to 10 times. Performance specifications are listed.

The relationship with InfiniBand and the storage server are presented in the paper, as well as configuration of the storage server.

Sun Oracle Database Machine

Easy to deploy out-of-the-box, Oracle writes that this solution for hosting its database is a fully integrated one and is ready to run on day one. Available in four models:

Full rack (8 database servers and 14 storage servers) for $1.15 million
Half-rack (4 database servers and 7 storage servers) for $650,000
Quarter-rack (2 database servers and 3 storage servers) for $350,000
Basic system (1 database server and 1 storage server) for $110,000

Common to all the Database Machines are:

Exadata Storage Servers, either SAS or SATA.

Industry standard Oracle Database 11g database servers with: two Intel Xeon dual-socket quad-core E5540 processors running at 2.53 Ghz processors, 72 GB RAM, four 146 GB SAS drives, dual port InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA), four 1 Gb/second Ethernet ports, and dual-redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

Sun Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand switches and cables to form a 40 Gb/second InfiniBand fabric for database server to Exadata storage server communication and RAC internode communication.

The performance and capacity characteristics of each model of the Database Machine is depicted

More Information

A Technical Overview of the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine

Sun Oracle Database Machine with Sun FlashFire Technology [...read more...]

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