Oracle Corp. has announced a fifth generation of its flagship Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4, saying hardware and software enhancements accelerate performance, increase capacity and improve quality of service for database deployments.
The release is particularly focused on online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, according to the company. OLTP workloads are typically used for order entry, financial transactions, and retail sales, where transactions are typically very short.
Oracle [NASDAQ: ORCL] says the new machine accelerates OLTP performance by quadrupling the flash memory. Using physical expansion and high-speed compression, a single-rack Exadata machine now supports 88TB of user data in flash memory, with a throughput of 100 GB per second.
Those performance improvements also impact the performance of data warehousing workloads, the company says, using “Flash caching algorithms that focus on table and partition scan workloads that are common in data warehouse. Tables that are larger than flash are now automatically partially cached in flash and read concurrently from both flash and disk to speed throughput.”
The improvements also allow hundreds of databases to be consolidated into a “database as a service,” environment. “Oracle Exadata now has the unique ability to transparently prioritize requests as they flow from database servers, through network adapters and network switches, to storage, and back,” according to the company. The machine uses InfiniBand network protocols to ensure reoting, batch and backup workloads don’t interfere with more time-sensitive interactive workloads.
In a statement, IDC research vice-president Carl Olofson said the new release helps eliminate the complexity of data managed in a siloed environment. The new system’s technology upgrade should deliver significant performance improvements that address the demand to implement database as a service, offering the scalability, control and availability to support a full range of database workloads,” he said.
While the new X4 is compatible with previous incarnations of the Exadata Database Machine, first released in 2008, the company claims numerous performance improvements, including:
* An increase of up to 100 per cent in database input/output operations per second, to 2.66 million reads and 1.96 million writes.
* X4-2 systems using two 12-core Intel Xeon processors show a 50 per cent increase in database compute performance.
* Nearly double the InfiniBand network throughput.
* Up to a petabyte of user data per rack using Oracle’s compression technologies.
Read more about the announcement on DataCenterKnowledge.com.