Oracle announced the general availability of the Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure, which offers extreme performance, reliability, availability, and security for all Oracle Database workloads. The new infrastructure offering is now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, bringing Exadata’s capabilities to any organization looking for database cloud capabilities that previously were only accessible by the largest, most established companies in the world.
The new offering is a significant move for Oracle, as it makes one of the industry’s most powerful database systems available to companies of every size. With infrastructure costs for running Oracle Database on Exadata Database Service starting at $357 per month—a 95% reduction from $10,800 per month—which works out to approximately $1.77 per hour, the performance and availability benefits of using Exadata are now within the reach of every organization.
By putting Exadata on Exascale infrastructure, Oracle delivers cutting-edge cloud database innovation that merges Oracle Exadata’s database-optimized capabilities with extreme cloud elasticity. The integration provides a robust, flexible, and cost-effective platform for modern enterprises’ wide range of cloud database workloads.
A Revolutionary Integration
Oracle Exadata is engineered to do only one thing: run Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Database faster and better than anything else on the market. It succeeds masterfully, providing purpose-built capabilities that maximize performance, scalability, and availability for Oracle Database workloads.
Exadata provides so many net incremental optimizations that running Oracle Database on any other platform is akin to running databases in a degraded mode. These unique Exadata capabilities are a critical part of Oracle’s broad multi-cloud strategy, such as with Oracle’s recent Database@Azure announcements.
Introducing Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure into this mix sees Oracle add a layer of scalability and flexibility designed to meet the demands of modern enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs. Integrating Exadata with the cloud results in a powerful, intelligent, and hyper-elastic infrastructure that can effortlessly handle a wide range of database operations, from AI and analytics to mission-critical OLTP tasks—regardless of size.
Using Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure, customer databases run on resources drawn from shared, database-optimized compute and storage pools. These are not generic virtual machines or block storage typically found in other clouds.
Rather, Exascale VMs take advantage of unique hardware and software optimizations that reduce latency and increase scalability while databases are distributed across the Exascale intelligent storage cloud for high throughput and availability.
As a result, customers have full access to all Oracle Exadata optimizations and cloud benefits—extreme Exadata performance for all their workloads combined with easy cloud-like scaling and pay-per-use economics.
New Exadata Exascale Capabilities
An essential differentiator of Oracle Exadata has long been its optimizations to reduce IO latency and increase scan throughput to accelerate OLTP and analytics workloads. Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure leverages this to fully take advantage of remote direct memory access, RDMA, to speed up transactions, automatic storage tiering to deliver the performance of flash at the cost of disk, and SQL offload to intelligent storage to accelerate analytics.
The combination of Exadata Exascale and Oracle Database 23ai adds several net new capabilities that improve how workloads run, along with the IT efforts required to manage them.
Intelligent Storage
The Exascale intelligent storage cloud automatically distributes databases across all available storage servers and maintains three copies of all data for high availability. It’s designed to optimize performance for both random and sequential data access, something required by the diverse set of applications built on the Oracle Database.
Abstracting database storage away from the physical storage servers that hold the data simplifies scaling and allows customers to specify only the amount of storage that they need.
AI Smart Scan
Exadata Exascale uses the new AI Smart Scan capability to accelerate the native AI Vector Search capabilities in Oracle Database 23ai. Individual searches are distributed across the Exascale intelligent storage cloud and executed in parallel, which Oracle has shown can provide up to a 30X improvement in performance and support thousands of concurrent vector searches in a multiuser environment.
Intelligent Thin Clones
Exadata Exascale provides intelligent thin clones to increase developer productivity and reduce storage costs. Oracle has built intelligence into the thin clones to allow cloning to occur not in the database VMs, which would impact database performance, but uses redirect-on-write technology to distribute the operations directly within the Exascale intelligent storage cloud.
Implementing thin clones inside the database means maintaining the integrity of the original database and all database clones. Developers can instantly access thin clones of production and read-write databases, and IT teams don’t have to worry about production databases suffering from performance degradations or developer-induced corruption.
Resource Abstraction
Exadata Exascale abstracts resource usage, eliminating the need to provision and manage individual database and compute servers. Customers can provision only the required resources and scale as needed, all without downtime. This model also eliminates additional charges for IOPS found in many other database services, making cost management predictable and affordable.
Analyst’s Take
Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure significantly advances cloud-based database infrastructure, offering unparalleled performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. This allows customers of all sizes to leverage Exadata on Exascale’s extreme performance and intelligent capabilities while providing the flexibility of a scalable, high-performance, cost-effective database solution.
The ability to scale resources dynamically allows businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and workload demands. This makes Oracle’s solution well-suited for enterprises looking to enhance database operations, improve agility, and maintain a competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
More critically, Exadata Exascale promises to benefit organizations looking to increase enterprise value and reduce costs by combining their business data with large language models using retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. Customers can implement a high-performance environment that combines business and vector data in the same database without implementing and integrating multiple isolated services, greatly simplifying the entire process.
Oracle Exadata on Exascale is a significant advancement in making high-performance database solutions more accessible and affordable. By leveraging advanced architecture and intelligent resource management, Oracle aims to further democratize its powerful database services, providing extreme performance and scalability to organizations of all sizes.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst, and NAND Research is an industry analyst firm that engages in, or has engaged in, research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. Mr. McDowell does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
