Amid a flurry of announcements at its annual OpenWorld conference, Oracle announced the Exadata Database Machine X8M which combines Intel Optane DC persistent memory and 100 gigabit remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to remove storage bottlenecks and increase performance for the most demanding workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), analytics, IoT, fraud detection, and high frequency trading.
“With Exadata X8M, we deliver in-memory performance with all the benefits of shared storage for both OLTP and analytics,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. “Reducing response times by an order of magnitude using direct database access to shared persistent memory accelerates every OLTP application, and is a game changer for applications that need real-time access to large amounts of data such as fraud detection and personalized shopping.”
According to Oracle, Exadata X8M will help customers perform existing tasks faster and accelerate time-to-insight, while also enabling deeper and more frequent analyses. Customers will also achieve performance benefits as workloads grow since the Exadata X8M’s performance scales as the platform grows.
Oracle Exadata X8M uses RDMA directly from the database to access persistent memory in smart storage servers, bypassing the entire OS, IO, and network software stacks, enabling lower latency and higher throughput. Using RDMA to bypass software stacks also frees CPU resources on storage servers to execute more Smart Scan queries in support of analytics workloads. Because persistent memory is located in shared storage, all databases consolidated on an Exadata platform get the performance benefits. Exadata Smart System Software automatically migrates the hottest database data to persistent memory while keeping cooler data on flash and disk. In addition, Exadata System Software automatically manages all high availability and redundancy of data stored in persistent memory. No application changes or administration tasks are required to leverage persistent memory with Exadata.
Supporting high-performance OLTP applications that require a demanding mixture of high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) with low latency, the X8M's direct database access to shared persistent memory increases peak performance to 16 million SQL read IOPS, 2.5X greater than the Exadata X8. Exadata X8M also reduces the latency of critical database IOs by enabling remote IO latencies below 19 microseconds—more than 10X faster than the Exadata X8.
With end-to-end integration between database software and smart persistent memory storage, Oracle says, the Exadata X8M goes beyond the performance achievable with other offerings using persistent memory. A single rack Exadata X8M delivers up to 2X the OLTP read IOPS, 3X the throughput, and 5X lower latency than shared storage systems with persistent memory such as a single rack of Dell EMC PowerMax 8000. By simultaneously supporting faster OLTP queries and greater throughput for analytics workloads, Exadata X8M is the ideal platform on which to converge mixed-workload environments to decrease IT costs and complexity.
Exadata X8M delivers the same machine learning capabilities as the Exadata X8, including Automatic Indexing, which continuously learns and tunes the Database as usage patterns change. Based on technology from Oracle Autonomous Database, the entire process is automatic and improves database performance while eliminating manual tuning.
Oracle has also announced availability of Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance X8M (ZDLRA), which uses new 100Gb RoCE for high throughput internal data transfers between compute and storage servers. Exadata and ZDLRA customers can now choose between RoCE or InfiniBand-based Engineered Systems for optimal flexibility in their architectural deployments.