A New Data Storage Company: Oracle !

In a keynote address to nearly 43,000 OpenWorld attendees, Oracle Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison unveiled the HP Oracle Database Machine, a system designed for extreme performance data warehouses.

The HP Oracle Database Machine consists of a grid of Oracle Database Servers and a grid of new Oracle Exadata Storage Servers packaged in a single rack ordered as a complete system from Oracle.

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HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server

The latest offering resulting from Oracle’s and HP’s long-time engineering relationship, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers break the performance bottleneck between database servers and conventional storage by shipping less data through larger pipes.
No changes are required to existing queries or business intelligence applications to deliver extreme performance for large Oracle data warehouses.

Oracle Exadata Product Family
The product family consists of two components.

HP Oracle Database Machine is pre-configured for performance, pre-tuned, and certified for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition tools and Oracle Real Application Clusters. Complete configurations can be ordered from Oracle, with hardware support by HP. The HP Oracle Database Machine is a high-performance system configured for data warehousing that includes a grid of eight database servers featuring: 64 Intel processor cores, and Oracle Enterprise Linux; and a grid of 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers that include up to 168 terabytes of raw storage and 14 GB/sec data bandwidth to the database servers.

HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are key performance enablers for the database machine and can be ordered separately if customers have an existing data warehouse and merely require the storage enhancements. Customers can build data warehousing solutions using HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, which feature industry-standard components including two Intel processors, up to 12 TB of raw storage and InfiniBand connectivity delivering 1 GB/sec of data bandwidth per storage server.

The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server uses a massively parallel architecture to dramatically speed up Oracle data warehouses by shifting the data-intensive part of query processing away from Oracle Database Servers and closer to the data.

HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers deliver 10x or more performance improvements in data-intensive query processing, have virtually unlimited I/O scalability, are easier to optimize for data warehousing, and provide mission-critical availability and reliability.

Availability & Delivery
The HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are available now. Complete configurations can be ordered from Oracle. Oracle is responsible for sales and system support. HP is responsible for hardware delivery and hardware service.

Comments

The idea of a dedicated hardware for database is not new. Copernique did one. But the French company was acquired in 1994 by EMC that stopped this remarkable product.

Now, the storage giant, as well as many other storage companies, see the arrival of a new huge competitor for database applications where a lot of SANs, and big ones, are shipped.

Note that, for its new database machine, Oracle chooses HP rather than Pillar Data, a storage system start-up in which Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison has already invested more than $200 million since 2001.

The new Exadata Storage Server is based on the HP ProLiant DL180 G5 server. Fitting into a 19-inch rack, it contains twelve hot-swappable hard disk drives, either 15,000rpm SAS 300GB devices or less expansive but slower 7,200rpm 1TB units, apparently using RAID-1, as well as two Intel 2.66 Ghz quad-core processors and redundant power supplies.

But the more amazing feature is dual 20Gb Infiniband ports for the connection to the database servers rather than FC or Ethernet. This choice could boost Infiniband, the best network in term of speed, but more expansive as it is only used for applications like video and HPC needing very high bandwidth. A maximum of 14 Exadata Storage Servers or cells can be connected in a grid architecture using IB switches from Voltaire or Mellanox to 8 HP Proliant L360 servers in a 42U rack running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux.

According to Oracle’s specs, I/O bandwidth is 1GBs on SAS or 750MBs on SATA per server. "A 10x speed up in query performance is often achieved compared to traditional data warehouse storage architectures, and 50x improvement or greater is achievable," stated the company.

HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server combined in one large rack will cost $650.000.

The companies specifically involved in datawarehouse appliances include DATAllegro (aquired by Microsoft), Dataupia, IBM, Netezza, Sybase and Teradata.

Watch Larry Ellison’s announcement at Oracle OpenWorld