Following closely behind announcements from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell Inc., Oracle Corp. today introduced an upgraded iteration of its hardware based on the latest-generation Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 chip series that was announced last month. The new Exadata X6 Database Machine can also be fitted with the eight-terabyte helium hard drives that hit the market recently to support storage-intensive workloads.

According to Oracle, the technology makes it possible to pack as much as 1.3 petabyte of disk capacity into a single rack, considerably more than what the previous incarnation of its appliance could accommodate. Coupled with the homegrown compression software that is included in the system, such a deployment can potentially store upwards of 10 petabytes of information. That should be enough for even the largest transaction processing and analytics environments, especially considering an Exadata deployment isn’t limited to a single closet.

But not every data-crunching application requires so much storage space. When it comes to business intelligence software, for instance, the speed at which a system can serve up records is often a bigger priority than its maximum capacity. As a result, Oracle is providing the option to order the Exadata X6 Database Machine with 3D V-NAND flash courtesy of either Intel or Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd instead of traditional disk drivers. Such a performance-optimized configuration is able to house over 358 terabytes of solid-state memory in a chassis, a feat that the vendor says makes its appliance denser than all the standalone SSD arrays on the market.

Moreover, the Exadata X6 Database Machine also makes better use of its flash than the competition thanks to software optimizations that Oracle claims facilitate near DRAM-level throughout. In practice, that amounts to some 300 gigabytes per second of throughput per rack, or about 10 times more than standalone arrays. And just to top it off, the company has added new network acceleration software into the mix that promises to make inter-node coordination up to three times faster than in the previous-generation appliance.

Analysis

Since its introduction and subsequent to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Exadata has become the workhorse for Oracle database deployments. Oracle has invested heavily, enhancing the platform with its form of virtualization (Oracle VM) and support for/integration with Oracle 12c. Oracle’s strategy has been to engineer hardware and software together in a way to optimize the number of cores needed support running databases. This approach significantly lowers the licensing costs for customers and puts Exadata competitors at a disadvantage because Oracle charges for all cores per processor running on competitive solutions. As an example, the Xeon E5-2600 v4 has 22 cores, which at a discounted license price of $22,000 per core would approach $500,000 on a competitor’s system. Oracle’s pricing on Exadata allows granularity of pricing down to as low as two cores in even number increments.

The combination of heavy investment, aggressive selling and licensing tactics that favor the use of Oracle hardware have allowed the company to gain significant share in the “database machine” market according to industry analysts. The three most impressive aspects of of the Exadata X6 announcement according to Wikibon analyst David Floyer are:

• The use of 3D V-NAND, a low cost/high density flash
• The X6’s internal system bandwidth of 300GB/sec.
• The Extreme Flash (all flash) variant of the Exadata X6 which has 358TB of NVMe flash per rack– scalable to 6 petabytes in multiple racks.

According to Floyer, “3D V-NAND has limited supply in the market and Oracle is using its heavyweight status to secure shipments. This technology dramatically lowers the cost of high performance storage and gives Oracle a competitive advantage.” Floyer’s assessment is that Exadata X6’s system bandwidth is industry leading meaning that the elapsed time to run applications will be much lower. The significance of he all flash version of Exadata X6 is it provides consistent, low latency performance for applications.

The reality for customers, according to Floyer, is that Exadata remains a narrow solution designed for Oracle-heavy workloads. It is not designed as a horizontal platform for mixed workloads in heterogeneous application environments. While Oracle has other products that address this use case, thus far the company’s hardware is not widely deployed outside of its own installed base.

Image via Geralt