Oracle's Exadata -- Storage system or data warehouse

By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer 26 Sep 2008 | SearchStorage.com

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used his Oracle OpenWorld conference keynote address Wednesday to launch the HP Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine.

The storage server is based on HP's ProLiant hardware and contains 12 disk drives and a dual Intel quad-core processor. The drives can be SAS or SATA in either 100 GB or 300 GB configurations. Each node can deliver up to 1 GBps of throughput with linear performance scaling as the cluster expands, Ellison said.

The Exadata servers can be packaged into the Database Machine, a preconfigured cluster with eight database servers and 64 quad-core processors, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle RAC software, and a 14-node storage server cluster with 168 disk drives.

All of this will be available, according to Ellison's presentation, for a system price of $650,000, plus a perpetual software license fee of $1,680,000.

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Ellison claimed the new products from Oracle will overcome performance bottlenecks for growing database repositories. The new system "allows us to put intelligence right next to every disk drive in the storage system. In fact, the storage system itself runs the Oracle database's fast parallel query software," he said.

Storage vendors said they're unconcerned

Storage vendors, including EMC, NetApp and HP, cite the multimillion dollar price tag and claim Oracle's new additions are closer competitors to data warehousing products from Netezza and Teradata than to traditional storage arrays. "The products are not apples to apples," said Ritu Jyoti, EMC's senior director of technical alliances. "This is servers and JBOD, meant to target data warehousing products like Netezza, and [EMC's] Symmetrix is a general-purpose disk array."

Jyoti also pointed out that EMC and Oracle have had a joint data warehouse product out for more than a year. EMC also has an OEM partnership with Netezza.

Some in the market, including HP representatives, drew a distinction between the query operations cited by Ellison in his speech and the other functions storage arrays provide in database environments, such as OLTP. But Ellison said at the end of his talk that Exadata is "the only database machine that also speeds up OLTP, as well as data warehousing," adding that 90% of the OLTP workload on Oracle-attached systems was for queries and reports.

Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman said the Oracle/HP systems will compete with high-end storage systems, but not midrange arrays. "Midrange customers can't afford to have specialised appliances for every workload – they need a general purpose storage system," he said.

For high-end environments, Reichman called Oracle's announcement a "booming shot across the bow of the storage vendor establishment" in a blog post. "Time will tell if Oracle can execute on this ambitious offering, but if they can deliver on their promises, all the major storage vendors should be watching their backs," he wrote.

However, not all storage experts buy the idea that the product will compete directly with any storage array. "This is specialised storage, but it goes beyond storage," said analyst John Webster of Illuminata. "This is tuning the entire system from the application on down, specifically for data warehousing projects."

Ellison has disk arrays in crosshairs

Ellison's speech specifically compared Exadata in both price and performance to "conventional disk arrays." He included slides comparing the Exadata system's performance against the high-end HP XP24000 array, EMC's midrange Clariion and high-end Symmetrix disk arrays, and what he described as a "high-end NetApp filer."

Ellison also compared Netezza and Teradata to his new systems. Ellison differentiated the price of Exadata against the data warehousing rivals by saying Exadata was "closer to a conventional disk array."

Storage vendors are already trying to get closer to applications with integrations like NetApp's SnapManager software and Ellison-backed Pillar Data System's application-aware storage. "Why deploy a storage vendor's version of application integration when you can deploy it directly from the application vendor?" Reichman asked. Purpose-built appliances are islands, "but who cares, if it's the right island?"

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