I had an opportunity last week to meet and discuss with one of the Oracle gurus and also top level Oracle professional Mr. Christopher G. Chelliah, Senior Director & Chief Architect, Asia Pacific Strategic Customers. He was visiting Dhaka for a business trip, I think.
Mr. Christopher gave a nice overview of Exadata - the high performance storage servers. He described the architectural design and some fringe benefits of the new product. I went there on behalf of another company (which is a sister concern of my present company) - we work in a national project. We were evaluating the high performance server for the probable National ID Databases.
Exadata is a complete hardware and software solution that Oracle targets for high performance data warehouses. This is a solution for both server and storage.
There are basically two components of Exadata.
1. The Server
2. The Storage
The server is clustered RAC, configured with multiple nodes, 8 nodes for us I think. The storage consists of 16 cells primarily, all these build the storage system which is basically another 16 database servers altogether!
The cool feature is, the database intelligence is distributed in server side and also in storage. Most of the data filtering are done on storage and the actual results are sent to server. It offloads the unnecessarily data transfer overheads of the network and also less processing for the actual server.
Some fringe benefits/features I marked are -
* Query predicate offloading feature
* Smart scan processing on storage server
* Reduced load on database servers - processings are distributed to storage side
* Optimized I/O and disk functionality
* Reliable hardware
* RAC with 8 nodes cluster for high performance and reliability
* High speed up and down link - 1 Gbps I think
* ASM for transparent storage management
And a lot more!
The technical stuffs could be found in Oracle's business site -
http://www.oracle.com/database/exadata.html
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