Oracle released the Oracle Exadata X6 Database Machine, introducing game-changing performance, capacity and availability, all at no additional cost.
“Oracle Exadata continues to lead the industry with breakthrough technology that delivers extreme performance and the best price/performance for online transaction processing (OLTP), analytics and consolidated database workloads.”
Oracle Exadata X6 features the latest, fastest Intel Xeon processors, with ultra-fast InfiniBand networking, scale-out Oracle Exadata Storage Servers with all-flash or disk plus flash storage, and Oracle Exadata’s exclusive Storage Server Software.
Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technologies, Oracle, states,
"Oracle Exadata is used by four of the five biggest banks, telcos, and retailers in the world because it delivers dramatically better OLTP, analytics and mixed workloads. The new Oracle Exadata X6 delivers flash performance that rivals DRAM performance, and much faster and more reliable OLTP. The same leading-edge Oracle Exadata technology is now available as a cloud service to enable the most effective database cloud service in the world."
Memory Level Performance with Shared Flash
Oracle Exadata X6 is the first and only database platform which combines the leading-edge 3D V-NAND flash with database intelligence in storage in order to achieve near DARAM level throughput from the shared flash. Oracle Exadata X6 enables in-memory performance at one-tenth the cost of pure in-memory platforms.
Oracle Exadata Breaks the Petabyte Barrier
The High Capacity variant of Oracle Exadata X6 uses state -of-the-art helium-filled eight terabyte (TB) disks to deliver more than 1.3 petabytes of disk capacity per rack. Along with this it integrates intelligent flash caching and delivers the performance of flash with the economics of disk capacity.
The Extreme Flash (all-flash) variant of Oracle Exadata X6 delivers more than 358 TBs of state-of-the-art NVMe flash per rack. This flash capacity goes beyond the maximum capacity of competitors’ all-flash storage arrays which is available in the market. Oracle Exadata can scale to more than six petabytes of flash with multiple racks.
Oracle Exadata’s industry-best Hybrid Columnar Compression technology is capable of increasing storage capacity by an average factor of 10X, providing better price-capacity for large data warehouses and consolidated database workloads.
Real-Time, All-the-Time OLTP
Oracle Exadata X6 breaks all barriers to real-time OLTP at any scale. OLTP scaling has been limited by random I/O bottlenecks, but Oracle Exadata X6 achieves over 5.6 million I/O operations per second per rack.
New Oracle Exadata InfiniBand-based algorithms such as the Direct-to-Wire protocol and Smart Fusion Block Transfers increase the speed of OLTP messaging by up to a factor of three.
The company states,
“All-the-time OLTP is supported through Oracle Exadata’s unique full-stack integration for instant detection of failures, sub-second redirection of I/O around failing devices, and fast problem resolution. Unique Database In-Memory fault-tolerance adds an additional layer of protection for the most performance-sensitive mixed workloads.”
Exadata on the Cloud
Additionally, to the purchase of Oracle Exadata X6 for deployment on premises, Oracle is now offering the option of using Exadata via the Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service. This service offers all the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition features, and is available via metered or subscription licensing.
Oracle has also announced Oracle Cloud at Customer, which allow customers to run Oracle Cloud services on their premises. All the Oracle Database Cloud Services, including the Oracle Exadata Database Cloud Service will be available via this offering.
Additional X6 Engineered Systems
In addition to the Oracle Exadata X6, the company is announcing X6 upgrades for two additional Engineered Systems, as per the official blog:
- Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance incorporates the new X6 technologies to further enhance Oracle Database protection featuring completely automated recovery, restore, backup, and logging; sub-second RPO to eliminate data loss exposure; and increased database performance by offloading backup processing.
- Oracle SuperCluster M7, integrated with Oracle Exadata X6 storage servers, is an ideal platform for Oracle Database and application consolidation solutions, allowing customers to maximize the performance and availability of both databases and applications in a single engineered system.