DSP: Exascale – Oracle Lowers Barriers To Entry for Hyper Converged Data Platform

Oracle’s innovation in Cloud and Cloud Data Management has been an interesting journey to watch and participate in. There are two types of innovation: incremental and radical. When it comes to the Oracle Database & Exadata, Oracle has enabled both incremental and radical innovation in the Cloud.

The Oracle Base Database Service and the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service are great examples of incremental innovation. In essence, Oracle has spent a lot of innovation dollars enabling the consumption of Oracle Data technologies through their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. While it seems like a relatively easy thing to do, I do not doubt that the challenge has been enormous.  Today you can deploy, and manage at scale, hundreds of database environments, ensuring your data security posture is maintained as well as configuration drift and patching cycle management. The transition to these services is a migration path which is unchanged, i.e. using tools built into the software to minimise the effort of that migration. Equally, once you’re there, the optional day-to -day management of those environments is easier, i.e. patching is still database patching - it’s just a click of the button.

In terms of radical innovation of Cloud Data Platforms, Oracle’s Autonomous Database is a key example. It’s essentially a pluggable database running on an Oracle Exadata but far more highly elastic and with more automation built in, and additional features on top of the base product, such as ML notebooks. This was followed by Oracle Database at Azure and now more recently Oracle Database at GCP. Let’s also not forget the 23ai release of the Oracle Database itself - innovation within the core product, not just the way it’s delivered, consumed or managed.

Oracle ExaScale is a new delivery method of Oracle Database on Exadata, now removing some of the previous  ‘barriers’ to running converged infrastructure in a Cloud environment. Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, much like Oracle Exadata On-Premises had different combinations of Database Servers and Storage Servers as part of that configuration. While it was elastic, jumps or increments in the base infrastructure were large, albeit OCPU scaling could be done in smaller increments. The upshot is that to get a base Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X9M up and running you would need a minimum of two Database Servers and three Storage Servers. This base cost is around £12K with OCPUs for databases on top of this. Once this infrastructure has been deployed, you can create your VM clusters on top of it and from there deploy databases.

Oracle ExaScale has removed the need to build out that base configuration of Database Servers and Storage Servers and moves straight to provisioning VM clusters on top of the Exadata service. In this scenario, you specify the number of CPUs, Storage, Smart Storage and Flash Cache. As a result, the base service is around 25% of an Exadata Cloud Service configuration which is significantly lower in terms of entry point.

BUT!!!!!

For me, the fact that it is much cheaper isn’t necessarily the primary benefit. The primary benefit comes from how organisations typically use Exadata, plus the aggressive region rollout for Oracle Cloud and the now lower barrier to entry.  Exadata is historically used as a consolidation platform, but, for geographically dispersed organisations, this could cause some challenges around data residency or data location. While Exadata could facilitate that consolidation, regulatory compliance may not allow you to. Therefore, with ExaScale, the lower cost entry and the availability across different OCI regions, fifty or sixty now means that the Database Consolidation platform can navigate the issue of regulatory and data governance issues with in-region ExaScale deployments ranging from the small to the large. Equally ExaScale allows you to deploy multiple Oracle Homes (think landing zones for databases), thus enabling you to segment workloads around different operational units, projects or teams.

If you would like to learn more about ExaScale, get in touch with our experts today: enquiries@dsp.co.uk.