13 Oct 2011 Oracle reveals EXALYTICS machine on Oracle Open World 2011
The major big announcement on the opening keynote of this year Oracle Open World was the presentation of the youngest of the EXA machines family, the new EXALYTICS in-memory appliance.
Oracle is serious about its engineered systems, as we’ve seen with their previous EXADATA and EXALOGIC machines and recently with the new Oracle Database Appliance, and now is the turn of the Business Intelligence applications.
We can see this EXALYTICS machine as a combination of hardware and software uniquely engineered to work together in order to offer fist-of-class performance of in-memory business intelligence OLAP analysis in terms of speed, simplicity and manageability. The machine is built following the parallel-everything paradigm Oracle is using in his latest products.
Talking about hardware, this little beauty is based on the 3RU Sun Fire X4470 M2 Server which debuted back in June this year and it’s powered by 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 series 10 core CPUs giving us a total 40 computation cores. Also it comes with a nice 1TB memory necessary for all the in-memory analysis. Fixed attached high performance RAID HBA storage of 3,6TB is also available on this appliance.
It’s network capabilities are in match with the hardware specifications, offering two quad-data rate 40GB/s infiniband ports for a possible EXADATA connectivity, plus two 10Gb/s for enterprise data sources and four 1Gb/s for customer access. Not bad at all.
But hardware is not just what makes this appliance the top-notch BI machine out there. Running on EXALYTIC you’ll have the bread and butter of Oracle BI software.
- Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation 11g (based on a future release)
- Oracle TimesTen in-memory database offering a 5x columnar compression.
- Oracle Essbase OLAP analysis engine.
Of course each one has been redesigned to offer unique features that leverage the hardware behind EXALYTICs.
Oracle’s president Larry Ellison said yesterday that “before you finish asking a question, it can guess and give you the answer” as he coined the “speed of thought” term. He also put some numbers on the stage. This machine can have a potential 5TB of data completely in-memory (using 5x compression) and scan that data at a rate of 200GB/s which is very impressive as many data warehouses could fit entirely in memory with this approach.
In terms of performance, Oracle claims that EXALYTICS improves response time by an average factor of 18x that rises to a 23x when using along EXADATA. For business users this mean that most of the analysis they can imagine will run in less than one second, and even the most complex ones will run in less than three seconds. “The latency? Is none” said Larry Ellison.
So far, neither the price nor the release date of this appliance was revealed at yesterday’s keynote. We will have to wait for further details from Oracle to know if this EXALYTICS machine is worth the price.
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