The Oracle Blog

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Oracle Open World Larry Ellison - Extreme Performance

We've all been waiting for the big announcement from Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World. This one is definitely going to shake things up a little bit. Here at the Moscone Center it's standing room only. Safra Catz CFO for Oracle introduced the keynote speakers.

HP, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group

By 2010 more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet growing needs. Their infrastructures are going to need to deal with Information explosion, CEOs demanding more from IT and an aging infrastructure of data centers.

They need to provide robust information to enable better business decisions. She said, HP blade servers have 50% of the blade server market. With the acquisition of EDS, HP is looking to manage more data centers for customers. She sees future data centers will have assets operating as a single virtual infrastructure. She showed a video of how data centers for HP have been evolving. They moved from 85 to 6 data centers. Highly emphasized blade servers. She sees virtualization as empowering deployments faster. She talked about PODs (performance-enhancing data centers) that can be built and shipped. They are portable. Want to use laser light beams instead of copper wire.

Oracle, Larry Ellison, CEO - Extreme Performance

Larry Ellison is here to talk about "Extreme Performance". Large data warehouses are doubling every few years. Current systems will not be able to handle the data bandwidth of future systems. "The Data Bandwidth Problem". Data warehouses start to slowdown at 10TB. Even the fastest disk storage systems start to fall apart at 10 TBs. Midrange storage arrays and NAS have trouble sooner. Multiple ways to solve the data bandwith problem. One way is to reduce the amount of data that needs to go from storage to database or increase the bandwidth.

Oracle is announcing Oracle's first hardware product, The Exadata Programmable Storage Server. They are partnering with HP on this. They are building intelligence into the storage to reduce data going through the pipes. It will pass query results back to database server not disk blocks. So instead of going through storage array and transferring all disk blocks to database server and database server filters out the disk blocks to generate a query result. The Exadata Storage Server. They pass the query to the storage arrays. Underlying ASM storage will perform parallel processing in the storage grid. This will take a lot of pressure off the bandwidth. Also will have wider pipes and more of them. They will have 2 Infiniband pipes. The Infiniband pipes are actually faster than the disk storage.

2 Intel processors: 8 cores
12 Disk Drives, up to 12 TB raw storage
Oralce Enterprise Linux OS
Oracle Parallel Query database software

The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server Grid is available with Linux today. Other systems coming. Believe in scaling horizontally:

Exadata Storage Grid
Oracle Database Grid
Fusion Middleware Grid

The Oracle HP Database Machine is the second database announcement, its all packaged for you:

8 Oracle database servers
64 Intel processsor cores
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Oracle Real Application Clusters
14 Exadata Storage Servers
14GB/sec data bandwidth
112 Intel Processor Cores
1000 GB disk drives

Current testing has shown 10 times to 72 times faster than current systems. He said Oracle mirrored Oracle's Primary Financial Data Warehouse and ran it on the Exadata Storage Server Grid and it ran 30 times faster. Larry compared the Oracle Database Machine and showed how they believe this new Oracle hardware is much faster than Teradata and Netezza. He believes Oracle now has a major architectural advantage. He said the delivery model is HP for systems delivery and hardware service and Oracle will provide sales and system support.

A good friend of mine looked at the pricing model for this solution and I heard numbers from 2 - 5 million dollars. So make sure you bring your checkbook for this. This I need to look at in more deail.

My understanding is that HP has exclusivity with Oracle for six months and then other companies can start working with Oracle using this technolog. Not sure about this, I have to look at it in more detail.

Labels: Evaluation of Enterprise Linux for Oracle, Exabyte Database Server, George Trujillo, Larry Ellison

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Evaluation of Enterprise Linux: George Trujillo

I have installed Enterprise Linux in two environments: On a standalone intel platform and also on a Apple MacBook Pro running Parallels. You can also install it with VMWare on Windows as well. Vmware and Parallels are excellent for running virtual machines with Oracle software. They provide a lot of flexibility when working with test environments.

The install of the Enterprise Linux was a very simple install, especially on the Apple MacBook running Parallels. For the Virtual Machine with Parallels, I'd make sure and install with at least 18GB of disk. You don't need quite this much but I wanted a little bit of flexibility. Within this 18GB of storage, I created:

/opt - 5GB for Oracle and other software (mainly for DB and App Server)
/u01 - 5GB for Oracle database and application server files.
/ - 3.3GB used for OS, used 1GB for swap, leaves some room for flexibility.

The Enterprise Linux operating system takes up at least 3.3GB if it is installed with the Server option and most of the Server packages are selected. Then you'll need the space for the Oracle database server and other software as well. If installing the Oracle 10g database or application server, you want to make sure you have at least 1GB of memory reserved for Oracle.

Enterprise Linux will be tested running the Oracle Database Server, Oracle Application Server, JDeveloper and SQL Developer. I'd love to test it running RAC but I will have to see how time allows it in the next few weeks. Time permitting I will put JBoss and MySQL on it as well.

There are not a lot of installation instructions, because Enterprise Linux installed easiliy on a standalone platform and in Parallels on Apple 10.4. If you are new to installing Oracle on Linux, go to otn.oracle.com and under Documentation go to Installing Oracle on Red Hat. Follow the step by step instructions and OTN will keep you on the yellow brick road. Make sure and set any kernel recommendations by Oracle.

With Parallels on Apple, just make sure to increase the default memory and disk storage. If using ISO files. make sure and set the default CD device to the ISO first file. When promped in Parallels for the next set of files, go to the Menu area and under Devices select Connect to the next ISO file. That way Parallels will find the next ISO file in the sequence.

I will follow with how the testing goes.

Labels: Evaluation of Enterprise Linux for Oracle