New Oracle Exadata X7 Delivers In-Memory Performance from Shared Storage

Continuing to raise the bar for enterprise-class database platforms, Oracle announced the next-generation Oracle Exadata X7 with significant hardware and software enhancements in overall performance, storage capacity, network bandwidth, and automation. Exadata X7 delivers extreme performance and reliability to run the largest, most business-critical database workloads.

Oracle Exadata is an Engineered System designed to be the ideal platform for all database workloads.  It features scale-out, database optimized compute, InfiniBand networking, and smart storage for fastest performance and low costs.

Specialized algorithms vastly accelerate all types of database processing including OLTP, Analytics, and Consolidation. Exadata’s full-stack automation and optimization of all components slashes the need for skilled human labor, enabling reduced costs and improved reliability.  Exadata’s simplicity, scalability, and reliability make it the foundation for the recently announced Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud.

Today, Exadata powers 4 out of 5 of the world’s biggest banks, telecoms, and retailers.  Exadata can be deployed on-premises, in Oracle Cloud, or using Oracle’s unique Cloud at Customer.

Exadata X7 hardware features the latest Intel© Xeon© Scalable Processors and a 100 percent increase in the capacity of Exadata’s industry-leading PCIeNVMe Flash storage, plus a 25 percent increase in disk capacity. A full rack Exadata X7 system has raw capacity of 1.7 petabytes of disk storage or 720 terabytes of NVMe all-Flash storage.

Additionally, Ethernet network bandwidth has increased by 150 percent from 10 to 25 Gigabits per second, while memory capacity and performance have increased by 50 percent. Overall, Exadata X7 database applications can realize 20 to 40 percent improvement in performance for OLTP, analytics and mixed workloads.

New Exadata Smart Software

Exadata’s end-to-end smart software has the unique ability to coordinate and optimize application performance across database servers, networking, and storage. Because Oracle owns and controls the entire stack of Exadata hardware and software technologies, functionality has been tailored to recognize different application workloads, prioritize operations in real time, and run database queries in both compute and storage servers. Every Exadata release increases these advantages.

Also announced today are new Exadata software innovations that extend the power of Oracle’s in-memory database technology to the large capacity of Exadata NVMe Flash storage, enabling analytic workloads to achieve in-memory performance against extremely large data sets in shared storage.

With this breakthrough, the same vector processing algorithms that make in-memory databases so fast in DRAM are applied to accelerate OLTP or Analytic databases by automatically creating a columnar formatted cache in Exadata Flash storage, boosting analytics by up to 400 percent.

New Exadata software also delivers in-memory performance from shared storage for OLTP workloads.  Exadata software now automatically uses DRAM as a cache in storage to speed-up access to data by up to 250 percent, as compared to already-fast Flash access times.

Unique algorithms automatically coordinate between database server and storage server memory caches to avoid redundant caching of the same data.  This feature cannot be implemented by conventional storage.

“Exadata continues to innovate faster than any other database or storage platform,” said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technology, Oracle. “Exadata’s scale-out, smart storage architecture was the first to support PCI/NVMe flash in 2014, with Exadata X5, the first to offload database queries to storage and the only platform to deliver in-memory performance from shared storage for OLTP and Analytics.  Exadata is the only database platform to have on-premises, public cloud and Cloud at Customer deployment options.”