What is Exadata?
Well I’ve been holed up playing with an Exadata V2 machine for the past several weeks. Wow. Very interesting technology.
I must say that I believe the concept of offloading SQL processing to the storage layer is a game changer and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this as a standard feature a few years from now. What that means for other storage vendors is unclear at this point. So for this first post on the topic let me just describe the configuration (and some potential upgrades).
The basic architecture consists of a set of database severs and a set of storage servers.
Database Servers:
- Sun x4170 (1RU 64x server)
- 2 – Quad-core Intel Xeon E5540 2.53GHz processors
- 72G Ram (18x4G Dimms – max of 144G using 8G DIMMs)
- Dual-Port QDR InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter
- HBA with 512MB Battery Backed Write Cache (only for internal disks???)
- 4 – 146G internal drives (SAS 10,000 RPM)
- dual hot swappable power supplies
- no spare/empty slots!
Here’s what the Database Servers look like:
Storage Servers:
- Sun x4275 (2RU 64x server)
- 2 – Quad-core Intel Xeon E5540 (2.53GHz) processors
- 24G Ram
- Dual-Port QDR InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter
- HBA with 512MB Battery Backed Write Cache (only for internal disks???)
- dual hot swappable power supplies
- 4 – 96G Sun Flash PCIe Cards (total of 384 GB)
- 12 – 600 GB 15,000 RPM SAS or 2 TB 7,200 RPM SATA
