Oracle intros Exadata Storage Expansion Rack

REDWOOD SHORES, USA: Oracle announced Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, a cost-effective way to add extreme performance storage servers to Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is aimed at big data. The company says that it will store massive structured and unstructured data including historical relational data; back-ups of Oracle Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files.

"Organizations today are continually challenged with managing and storing the explosive growth in both structured and unstructured data," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "By combining leading, industry-standard servers and storage hardware from Sun with the intelligence built into Oracle software, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack allow customers to achieve unmatched data scalability, capacity and reliability."

Standard Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack configurations come with 96 Terabytes to more than 3 Petabytes of Raw Disk Storage using only the included InfiniBand switches.

Oracle claims that over 10 Petabytes of user data can be stored using the Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, which is included. The rack also features Flash PCI Card Capacity ranges from 1.5 TB to 47 TB.

The Intel Xeon CPU processing power in the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers range from 48 CPU Cores to more than 1,500 CPU Cores.

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack has 'complete' redundancy built in to support the demands of critical applications including redundant 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand connectivity.

As per the company each server features swappable disks, power supplies and fans.

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack also supports Oracle Exadata Storage Software features including Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, Oracle Exadata Smart Scan, Oracle Exadata Storage Indexes, Oracle Exadata Data Mining Offload, Oracle Exadata Backup Acceleration; and, Oracle Exadata I/O Resource Manager prioritization.

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) automatically balances data across Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, evenly balancing the I/O load across the racks to fully utilize all available hardware. ASM also provides disk mirroring (normal or triple mirrored) to protect against disk failures, loss of data and safeguard data accessibility, claims the company.

Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack comes in three configurations:

Full Rack with 18 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers delivering up to 6.75 TB of Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 432 TB of raw disk storage, and 216 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage;

Half Rack with 9 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers delivering 3.4 TB of Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 216 TB of raw disk storage, and 108 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage; and,

Quarter Rack with 4 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers delivering 1.5 TB of Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache, 96 TB of raw disk storage, and 48 CPU Cores for SQL processing in storage.

All three versions of the Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack are delivered with the same 2 TB High Capacity SAS disks and Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache available in the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Up to eight Oracle Exadata Database Machine racks and Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Racks can be simply connected via InfiniBand cables to achieve single storage grid with a raw disk capacity of 3,360 TB. Larger configurations can be built with additional switches, says the company.