Oracle Introduces Exadata Cloud Service X8M

Oracle announced the new generation of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, now based on the Exadata X8M platform, available this month on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Customers can accelerate their most challenging transaction processing and data analytics projects with Exadata X8M in 26 global cloud regions and Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. With architectural identicality across cloud and on-premises, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M makes it easy for customers to move even the largest and most demanding databases and workloads seamlessly to the cloud with no changes to applications. Breakthrough performance, scale and elasticity enable Exadata Cloud Service X8M to run applications needing multiple workloads and data types in a single converged Oracle Database. In contrast, AWS users need to perform complex and costly integration of multiple different database services. Start here.

“As an increasing number of organizations shift their important workloads to the cloud, they have found that many cloud databases have performance, availability and scaling limitations,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. “With today’s announcement, Oracle enables customers to run any business-critical database workload—including the largest and most compute and memory-intensive workloads—with dramatically faster performance, higher scalability and elasticity, and lower costs than any other cloud provider. The new generation of Oracle’s Exadata Cloud Service is based on the proven Exadata platform that is already in use by 86 percent of the Fortune Global 100 to run their most demanding workloads.”

Cloud-Automated Extreme Performance and Availability

Oracle Exadata X8M, the new platform for Exadata Cloud Service, features Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) from databases to Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory in smart storage servers, completely bypassing the OS, IO, and network software stacks. This enables 2.5 times higher transaction processing IOs, and 10 times better IO latency than the previous industry-leading Exadata Cloud Service release. Database IOs are 50 times faster than Amazon AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) using all-flash storage. RDMA runs over a new, ultra-fast, 100Gbs RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) network fabric for the highest analytics throughput.

Exadata Cloud Service X8M also features a new generation of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) that delivers greatly enhanced application transparent database scale-out and high availability for all types of database workloads. In addition, fully-active Oracle Data Guard database replicas offload SQL reads and writes while providing cloud-automated disaster protection within and across regions.

Breakthrough Scale

With Exadata Cloud Service X8M, no database or workload is too large. Oracle Databases deployed on Exadata Cloud Service X8M can scale up to 4,600 CPU Cores, 44 TB DRAM, 96 TB persistent memory, 1.6 PB flash, and 25 PB of database capacity. Exadata Cloud Service X8M supports relational databases that are 20X bigger than possible to run on AWS today with RDS or Aurora—and bests both AWS RDS and Aurora by 25 times in CPU scaling.

Exadata Cloud Service X8M is fully elastic. Customers can start small with a minimum-sized HA configuration with as few as four CPU cores enabled, and expand by adding compute or storage as needed with no downtime. In contrast, AWS lacks true online elasticity as AWS RDS offers no scale-out capabilities; Aurora DB instance scaling “will have an availability impact” according to Amazon; and AWS Redshift offers no read-write elastic scaling. None of these AWS database services offer true online patching and maintenance like Exadata Cloud Service X8M.

Breakthrough Low Cost

The breakthrough performance of Exadata Cloud Service X8M enables customers to support more users, deploy more databases, execute more transactions, and accelerate analytics on less hardware and in less time, saving costs. In addition, customers pay only for what they need. Organizations can scale Database and Storage independently online as needed, and reduce costs with by-the-second pay-per-use.

What Customers are Saying

Burns and McDonnell is a leading US$4B design and construction firm, currently ranked #1 in the power industry. “We chose Exadata Cloud Service so that we could easily and immediately scale up to meet demand spikes without having to buy and deploy additional infrastructure in our data center,” said Joe Kor, PMP, department manager, IT Enterprise Applications, Burns and McDonnell. “With Exadata Cloud Service we’ve been able to reduce costs by 35 percent and seamlessly move databases from on-premises to the cloud with Exadata’s architectural identicality. Of course, we can always use more performance to support real-time analytics and deliver superior customer experiences, so we look forward to using Exadata Cloud Service with X8M’s orders of magnitude improvements in latency, IOPS, and throughput.”

Manappuram Finance Limited is a $2B financial services company based in India. “Manappuram is helping customers transform their dreams into reality. We rely on modern technologies to help us serve customers better, quicker and more efficiently. As we embark on our next growth phase we wanted a secure modern cloud platform,” said B.N. Raveendrababu, executive director, Manappuram. “Taking into account all our business objectives, we choose Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud along with Exadata Cloud Service for their enterprise grade features, such as superior security and high performance capabilities. We anticipate 30 to 40 percent in cost savings over the next 5 years and performance improvements in the range of 2 – 3x times than what is available currently.”

What Analysts are Saying

“Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M combines the high throughput and recoverability capabilities of the Exadata X8M platform with Oracle’s second-generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deliver an optimal database cloud experience,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, Data Management Software, IDC. “Faster performance translates into less time spent on the cloud and lower cloud usage costs. Moreover, with architectural consistency across all Exadata deployment models, Oracle customers can move from on-premises to cloud or from cloud to cloud with no application changes. They also can query multiple types of data within the same database using their choice of access models. This capability can eliminate additional, excessive cloud costs and management headaches.”

David Floyer, CTO, Wikibon, said, “OLTP systems of record are growing more complex. Analytic systems are growing bigger and answers are needed faster. Data-driven businesses are combining both in real-time. The cloud database technical requirements to meet these challenges include the ability to combine row and column access, integrate SQL and NoSQL databases, and support ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth IO. The Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M has been upgraded to provide best-in-class IO latency (~20 µsecs), a hefty data warehouse (25 PB), together with excellent vertical and horizontal scaling. Wikibon assesses this service to be the highest-performance cloud database service available.”

Read what analysts have to say about the new Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Additional Resources

• Watch Juan Loaiza’s updates on the new Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M
• Read the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M blog
• Read Carl Olofson’s new blog on Exadata Cloud Service X8M
• Learn more about Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M
• Oracle Unleashes World’s Fastest Database Machine