Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X4-8 has been enhanced with increased compute, memory, and communication to support data-intensive operations, including data warehousing, OLTP, and big data analytics.
The X4-8 is a complement to the X4-2, released in late 2013, which is built on the Intel 2 processor chip, and comes in full rack, half rack, quarter rack and eighth rack sizes.
Each time Oracle has a release of Exadata there are two models and the first one is the 2-socket and then roughly 6 months later is the 8-socket, explains Tim Shetler, vice president of product management, Oracle. According to Shetler, the new X4-8 is an ideal platform for hosting memory-intensive workloads such as database as a service (DBaaS) and the Database In-Memory option. With up to 12 terabytes (TB) of DRAM memory, the Exadata Database Machine X4-8 can consolidate hundreds of databases and can run massive databases entirely in-memory.
Many Exabriefing customers are using the machine to consolidate databases in their data center so they can eliminate server sprawl and combine databases into a common Exadata platform, adds Shetler. These consolidation workloads also consume a lot of memory as well, he notes.
Moreover, he points out, the X4-8 is also a strong platform for a global-scale transactional system like Oracle E-Business Suite, which leveraged by many clients for global operations since a single instance implemented on a big Exadata system can be accessed by all of a company’s subsidiaries and all of its organizations worldwide.
Overall, Exadata Database Machine X4-8 provides large performance and memory increases compared to the previous generation. The hardware enhancements include 50% more database compute cores, using the Intel Xeon E7 v2 15-core processors, and up to 6TB of memory per compute node for a total of 12TB per rack. “That is the key, major enhancement in the X4-8,” said Shetler.
More information is available about the Exadata Database Machine X4-8.