Storage Expansion Rack for Oracle Exadata

Oracle Corp. announced the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, a way to add performance storage servers to an Exadata Database Machine.

The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is for storing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data including historical relational data; backups of Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files.

Standard Exadata Storage Expansion Rack configurations come with 96 Terabytes to more than 3 Petabytes of Raw Disk Storage using only the included InfiniBand switches.

More than 10 Petabytes of user data can be stored using the Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression which is included.

Also included, the Flash PCI Card Capacity ranges from 1.5 TB to 47 TB.

The Intel Xeon CPU processing power in the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers range from 48 CPU Cores to more than 1500 CPU Cores.

Scalability for Mission-Critical Database Storage
The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack has redundancy built in to support the demands of critical applications including redundant 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand connectivity.

Each server also features hot-swappable disks, power supplies and fans for high availability.

The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack supports
the range of Exadata Storage Software features including:

• Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression that typically provides 10x compression;
• Exadata Smart Scan that runs database queries directly in storage;
• Exadata Storage Indexes;
• Exadata Data Mining Offload;
• Exadata Backup Acceleration; and,
• Exadata I/O Resource Manager prioritization by Database User or Job.

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) dynamically and automatically balances the data across Exadata Storage Servers, evenly balancing the I/O load across the racks to utilize all available hardware.

ASM also provides disk mirroring (normal or triple mirrored) to protect against disk failures, loss of data and safeguard data accessibility.

The Exadata Storage Expansion Rack
comes in three configurations:

• Full Rack with 18 Exadata Storage Servers delivering up to 6.75 TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 432 TB of raw disk storage, and 216 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage;
• Half Rack with 9 Exadata Storage Servers delivering 3.4 TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 216 TB of raw disk storage, and 108 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage; and,
• 
  Quarter Rack with 4 Exadata Storage Servers delivering 1.5 TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 96 TB of raw disk storage, and 48 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage.

All three versions of the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack are delivered with the same 2 TB High Capacity SAS disks and Exadata Smart Flash Cache available in the Exadata Database Machine.

Up to eight Exadata Database Machine racks and Exadata Storage Expansion Racks can be connected via InfiniBand cables to achieve single storage grid with a raw disk capacity of 3,360 TB. Larger configurations can be built with additional switches.

"Organizations today are continually challenged with managing and storing the explosive growth in both structured and unstructured data," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "By combining leading, industry-standard servers and storage hardware from Sun with the intelligence built into Oracle software, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack allow customers to achieve unmatched data scalability, capacity and reliability."