Oracle announced the availability of the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack and Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion. The new Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack is intended to help customers jump start their first big data projects and the new Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion is aimed at helping them cost-effectively scale the system as their data grows. In addition, the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 (Full Rack configuration) is now available through Oracle Infrastructure as a Service.
The Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack contains six Oracle Sun servers within a full-sized rack with redundant Infiniband switches and power distribution units. The Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion includes a pack of six additional servers to expand the configuration to 12 nodes. When needed, an additional In-Rack Expansion can be added to expand to a full rack of 18 nodes.
Both new systems include the existing software stack for Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 which was introduced a little over a year ago, says George Lumpkin, vice president for Big Data and Data Warehouse Product Management at Oracle. This includes Oracle Linux, Oracle Hotspot Java Virtual Machine, Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), Cloudera Manager and the Oracle NoSQL Database, a distributed key-value store. “The software stack is the exact same software stack that we had when we introduced the Big Data Appliance,” notes Lumpkin.
Oracle is also providing SQL access to HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) data, enabling organizations to leverage their existing Oracle SQL skillsets and tools to seamlessly query and analyze data stored in Hadoop.
Enabling organizations to obtain Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 on-premise, behind their firewall, for a monthly fee, the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 (Full Rack configuration) is now available through Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Oracle IaaS for Oracle Big Data Appliance helps organizations eliminate the upfront capital expenditures for their big data needs and also helps them avoid the issue of having their system off-premises as they would with some cloud solutions, points out Lumpkin.
With the additional configurations, there is now an Oracle Big Data Appliance family of products consisting of a Full Rack, a Starter Rack and an In-Rack Expansion.
However, while the Big Data Appliance is an important piece in the Oracle big data picture, it is not the only one, notes Lumpkin, and Oracle is continuing its strategy of integrating big data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL into the broader Oracle ecosystem.
More information is available about the Oracle Big Data Appliance.