Last week, Oracle Exadata Exascale was released, and it is one of the features that I have been most excited about in a while. I will be writing a couple of blogs around the topic, and in them, we will go over how to deploy it and technically deep into it. But first, in this one, I just want to answer two questions: What is it and What are the benefits of it?

 

What is Exadata Exascale ?

Exadata Exascale is a new loosely coupled architecture that brings Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and SQL offload to your data. Exascale utilizes a direct I/O path architecture to enable Oracle Database 23ai to send data requests directly to storage. Before Exascale,  Exadata had dedicated compute and storage nodes and ASM was used to distribute storage across databases, by eliminating the need for intermediary storage management tiers (ASM), communication becomes significantly faster to the storage nodes Most importantly, the direct I/O architecture is essential for your Oracle Database to utilize the unique RDMA-enabled memory cache in Exadata storage, known as Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM). Exascale will intelligently move hot data from disk to memory or flash. This will deliver the performance of DRAM, the IOPS of flash, and the capacity of disks. Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure is currently available in four regions: San Jose, Ashburn, Frankfurt, and Johannesburg, but it will be coming soon to all regions and Exa@CC.

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What are the benefits of Exadata Exascale?

Exadata Exascale transforms the utilization of the database storage and virtual machines, integrating cloud attributes such as hyper-elasticity, multi-tenancy, and resource pooling into the Exadata. In Layman’s terms, this means that you now have the option of using the power of Exadata at a significantly lower cost of entry point. 

Before Exascale, for you to be able to utilize an Oracle Database on an Exadata infrastructure (ExaCS), you would need to provision 2 compute nodes and 3 storage servers with a minimum of 4 OCPUs ( 2 per VM). As per the OCI Cost Calculator, this comes to about $19,397.00 CAD.  For an Oracle Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure (ExaDB-XS), you can start with a cluster of 2 VMs, each with 8 ECPUs and 22 GB of memory, and begin with 300 GB of Exadata database storage, the cost of this ExaDB-XS is 5,708.74 CAD. The percentage of savings is 70.57%! This also means that you allocate and pay for only the storage capacity you need for your databases and you don’t pay for IOPS.

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You will be able to grow VMs in increments of 4 ECPUs each, add more VMs, and scale Exascale storage with Gigabytes or Terabytes of additional capacity, with a maximum of 

  • 10-VM Cluster
  • 200 Total ECPUs per VM
  • 2 TB filesystem storage per VM
  • 100 TB Exascale Vault database storage per VM Cluster

As of the writing of this blog post, the minimum version requirements for you to utilize ExaDB-XS is 

  • Oracle Database 23.4
  • Grid Infrastructure 23.4
  • Exadata Image 24.0

Another benefit is that you can easily create the database or PDB clones for development or testing. Whether you need a full copy or thin clones, Exascale requires no complex prerequisites—no need for a read-only test master or similar setups. You can clone across CDBs and VM clusters, leveraging Exascale’s redirect-on-write technology, which allows clones to share blocks with the parent until changes are made. This approach drastically reduces storage capacity needs for cloning while delivering native Exadata performance on development, test, or recovery copies. This can empower your developers by enabling the creation of hundreds of PDB clones for your dev teams.

 

Conclusion

The ExaDB-XS service offers a cost-effective solution that enables new workload deployments, ensuring your organization can efficiently manage and expand its operational capabilities. With its seamless scalability, the service provides the flexibility to scale up and out as needed, adapting to the dynamic demands of your business environment. This capability allows for rapid resource growth, ensuring you can meet increasing workloads without incurring significant additional costs. As your business expands, ExaDB-XS supports your development and testing needs by providing robust and agile development cloud storage efficiency, making it the best of the cloud and Exadata all in one place!