Other reactions to the Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine

I live-blogged the announcements of the Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine, but obviously couldn't get all the pertinent points in my posts.

Luckily, the @oracleopenworld account helpfully tweeted the link http://www.oracle.com/exadata/index.html.

Oracle Exadata is a family of high performance storage software and hardware products that can improve data warehouse query performance by a factor of 10X or more. Oracle Exadata Storage is a combination of smart storage software from Oracle and industry-standard hardware from HP. Overcoming the limitations of conventional storage, Oracle Exadata uses a massively parallel architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage. In addition, smart storage software offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g Servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The result - faster, parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections.

The Oracle Exadata Storage Server is based on the HP ProLiant DL180 G5 server, and is a fast, reliable, high-capacity, industry-standard storage building block. With a choice of SAS or SATA drives and a storage capacity up to 12 TB, it has Oracle Exadata software pre-installed. In addition to extremely fast query processing for your large data warehouses, the massively parallel architecture offers linear scalability and mission-critical reliability.

Oracle Exadata Storage provides the foundation for building dynamic storage grids, and is the building block for the HP Oracle Database Machine. Designed for large, multi-terabyte data warehouses, the HP Oracle Database Machine is a complete package of software, servers, and storage. Simple and fast to implement, it has the power to tackle large-scale business intelligence problems immediately and can scale linearly as your data warehouse grows.

And information on the HP Oracle Database Machine can be accessed via http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/database-machine.html.

The HP Oracle Database Machine is a complete system, including software, servers, and storage, designed to run large, multi-terabyte data warehouses 10x faster than conventional data warehouse systems. At the heart of the Database Machine, is the Oracle Exadata Storage Server, which has smart storage software that offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g Servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The Database Machine also includes Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Linux, all the required Infiniband infrastructure and related hardware. Simple and fast to implement, the HP Oracle Database Machine has the power to tackle large-scale business intelligence problems immediately and can scale linearly as your data warehouse grows.

More information is available in the PDF for the HP Oracle Database Machine:

HP Oracle Database Machine Hardware
(all hardware components in one standard (42U) rack)

8–HP Proliant DL360 G5 database servers, with
• 2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
• 32GB memory
• 1–HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
• 4–146GB SAS 10K hard disk drives
4–24-port InfiniBand switches
14–HP Exadata Storage Server Hardware—each is an HP ProLiant DL180 G5, with
• 2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
• 8GB memory
• 1–HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
• 12–300GB SAS or 12–1TB SATA disk drives
1 48-port Gigabit Ethernet switch (used for management connectivity to servers and switches)
Keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) hardware
Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5.1
HP Hardware Warranty, 3 year parts/3 year labor/3 year onsite, 4 hour, 24x7
On-site installation and configuration

Key Capabilities (per rack)

HP Oracle Database Machine Hardware SAS 300
• Up to 14GB/sec of raw, uncompressed I/O throughput
• Up to 1TB/hour data loading
• Up to 14TB of user data
1
HP Oracle Database Machine Hardware SATA 1000
• Up to 10.5GB/sec of raw, uncompressed I/O throughput
• Up to 1TB/hour data loading
• Up to 46TB of user data1

HP Oracle Database Software (sold separately)

• For database servers: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle
Partitioning
• For storage servers: Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software

High-Availability Features

• Redundant power supplies for all servers
• Redundant InfiniBand switches
• Oracle Automatic Storage Management: All database files mirrored; disk failures do not interrupt query processing
• Oracle Real Application Clusters: database server failures are tolerated
• Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software: storage server failures are tolerated
• Backup is performed using Oracle Recovery Manager
• Point in time restores are performed using Oracle Flashback Technologies

Manageability Features
• HP Lights-Out hardware management
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

eWeek reports:

In a move meant to shake up the data warehousing market, Oracle has unveiled a data warehouse product focused on high performance.

Dubbed the HP Oracle Database Machine, the appliance is aimed squarely at challenging data warehousing vendors Teradata and Netezza. At the core of the product is the ‘Exadata Storage Server’, which can support up to 12 terabytes of raw storage data and leverages InfiniBand connectivity.

Mark Rittman:

So, the mystery “X” product was a database / data warehouse appliance, using HP Hardware and a custom storage server that takes predicates provided by the database and filters the data locally, returning just the results / columns back to the database rather than whole blocks of data.

In his post, Rittman links to Kevin Closson's Oracle Blog:

I would like to take my first blog post on the topic of Oracle Exadata Storage Server to reiterate the primary value propositions of the solution.

* Exadata is fully optimized disk I/O. Full stop! For far too long, it has been too difficult to configure ample I/O bandwidth for Oracle, and far too difficult to configure storage so that the physical disk accesses are sequential in nature.

* Exadata is intelligent storage. For far too long, Oracle Database has had to ingest full blocks of data from disk for query processing, wasting precious host processor cycles to discard the unrelated data (predicate filtering and column projection).

Oracle Exadata Storage Server is Brute Force. A Brawny solution.

And now that the word is out, people from Oracle are talking. Jeff Erickson:

[A]t an Oracle Magazine lunch on Tuesday I sat next to a beta participant for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Once we had established that I was on the inside of the project, he shared a story that made me look forward to the announcement even more.

Without ever mentioning the product by name, the beta participant told me that the first time he used Exadata, he and his team thought they had made a mistake. The query came back too fast. They spent two hours on the line with Oracle trying to fix the problem. But there was no problem; Exadata was simply faster than anything they had experienced before.

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