Oracle Corp. introduced its Exadata platform for customers to run the technology giant’s database offering in October 2008. Today, the company celebrated Exadata’s 13th birthday by releasing a number of new enhancements.

The X9M version represents a new family of products designed to make Exadata easier to use, more manageable, more highly available and with additional options for customers seeking workload consolidation, according to Juan Loaiza (pictured), executive vice president of mission-critical database technology at Oracle.

“It’s the new generation,” Loaiza said. “We’re making it better across all the different dimensions for online transaction processing, for analytics, lower cost, higher IOPS, higher throughputs and more capacity. It’s improved across all the dimensions and not in small ways, in big ways. It’s the same product, even better. That’s the big picture.”

Loaiza spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, in an interview. They discussed the technology behind XM9’s performance improvements, key changes in the storage tier, industry benchmarks and expected appeal to Oracle’s Exadata customer base. (* Disclosure below.)

Boost for OLTP and analytics

With the release of X9M, Oracle is claiming significant performance improvements for OLTP and analytics.

“OLTP has 50% to 60% performance improvement; analytics has an 80% performance improvement,” Loaiza said. “All of these are big benefits.”

Oracle believes those benefits will translate into meaningful improvements for customers. Loaiza makes the point that technology improvements to Exadata can have farther-reaching impact on the business side than similar advances for consumer-based platforms.

“If I get a new smartphone that’s faster, it doesn’t actually reduce my cost,” Loaiza said. “With a server product like Exadata, if I have 50% faster performance, I can serve 50% more users, 50% more workload, 50% more data. Big customers of ours, like banks, telecoms and retailers, can take that performance into better response times and lower costs.”

What allowed Oracle to realize the kind of performance improvements it is claiming for the latest Exadata release was a number of enhancements in both the software and hardware stack. This includes key modifications in the storage space.

“We use persistent memory as the first tier of storage,” Loaiza explained. “Unlike normal memory, it doesn’t lose its contents when you lose power. We also do remote direct memory access, which means the hardware sends the new data directly into persistent memory and storage with no software. That’s what enables us to achieve this extremely low latency.”

Benchmarks and customer appeal

Oracle has benchmarked its Exadata offering against Redshift, a cloud data warehouse product offered by Amazon Web Services Inc., and Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL relational database.

“We compared what we run, both in public cloud and Cloud@Customer against the Redshifts and Auroras in their public cloud, which are their most scalable available products,” Loaiza said. “We are getting something like 50 times lower latency and close to 100 times analytic throughput.”

These kinds of benchmarks could become significant as major cloud players, such as Oracle and AWS, compete for market share. Oracle has already built a sizable user base for Exadata, with 87% of the global Fortune 100 as customers, according to Loaiza.

“This product has grown to encompass most of the major corporations in the world and governments also,” he said. “If you care about data, if you care about performance of data, if you care about availability of data, if you care about manageability, if your care about security, those are the customers that should be looking strongly at Exadata and those are the customers that are adopting Exadata.”

Loaiza is quick to point out that Exadata is not geared solely for large enterprise customers. Oracle has also made inroads in the smaller to medium-sized business market for the product, he indicated.

“One of the things we’ve introduced in our Cloud@Customer and public cloud Exadata platforms is the ability for Oracle to manage all of the infrastructure,” Loaiza said. “This enables smaller customers that don’t have as much IT sophistication to adopt this very mission-critical technology. We’re getting universities, governments, smaller businesses adopting Exadata because the cloud model for adopting it is dramatically simpler.”

Oracle’s value proposition for Exadata is that it’s accessible and useful for customers of any size. The company’s latest platform enhancements are designed to drive home the message that it’s still all about the data.

“The ideal customer is pretty straightforward; it’s a customer that cares about data,” Loaiza said. “We’re not sitting back. We have the pedal to the metal, and we’re keeping it there.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: Oracle sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE