Oracle presented the evolution of its Exadata platform for databases and other applications mission critical : Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M is positioned as one of the best performing systems in the world thanks to top-notch features and cloud integration capabilities. However, according to Oracle, these specifications would be accompanied by cost savings that would reach the 30% compared to the competition.

Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M: power (almost) without limits for databases and beyond

Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M is based on the same platform as Exadata X8M and is designed to operate in the Oracle cloud, whether it is in one of the company’s data centers or in the Dedicated Region Cloud @ Customer presented last summer together with the Exadata X8.

Oracle offers Exadata Cloud Service X8M as a platform that allows you to rapidly expand and without rewriting applications your workloads, bringing them to the public cloud or using the latter’s resources without interruption and without affecting the availability of services. It is a hardware and software solution designed to facilitate the so-called “scale out”, i.e. the improvement of the performance of one’s workloads through the expansion of the infrastructure (as opposed to the “scale up” others more powerful).

Exadata X8M stands out from the competition due to the use of technology Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA): thanks to it the DBMS, that is the database engine, communicates directly with the memory, the network and the storage devices bypassing the operating system. This eliminates the major overhead creation point, thus increasing the performance of transaction I / O by 2.5x and reducing the latency of 10 times. According to Oracle this makes I / O operations 50 times faster than those offered by AWS Relational Database Service.

However, it’s not just a question of software. Part of the performance improvement is also due to the use of Intel Optane memory and a new network fabric which Oracle calls RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) capable of ensuring speeds up to 100 Gbps and low latency. Exadata X8Ms go up to 4. 600 core of CPU , 44 TB of RAM , 96 Persistent Memory TB Intel Optane, 1.6 PB of flash memory and 25 Storage PB on traditional disks . Oracle states that “no database is too large for Exadata Cloud Service X8M” and numbers like that lead one to think it’s true.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) offers improved functionality for the scale out of databases in a transparent way for applications (i.e. without the applications being aware of it). Database replicas created by Oracle Data Guard also allow you to perform the offloading of the SQL read and write actions on the replication database.

Oracle emphasizes that it is not necessary to use all the capabilities of Exadata Cloud Service X8M , but that it is possible to start with only 4 cores and then expand the computing and storage capacities as needed. These expansions (and contractions) are in real time and without interruptions to ensure maximum availability of the service.

“More and more companies are bringing their most important workloads to the cloud, discovering that many databases in the cloud have performance, availability and scalability limits” states Juan Loaiza , Oracle’s Executive Vice-President for mission-critical database technologies. “With this novelty, Oracle now allows its customers to manage any database workload with mission-critical characteristics, including the most demanding and ad high demand for computing and memory capacity, with extremely better performance, greater scalability and elasticity and lower costs, compared to any