Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M

Oracle Exadata X8M key differentiators

Oracle Database Cloud improves efficiency

Oracle Database’s converged database capabilities and Exadata X8M’s acceleration of diverse database workloads enable customers to create on-premises database clouds that maximize consolidation efficiency.

Unique features accelerate results

Exadata X8M's exclusive capabilities, like the Persistent Memory Data Accelerator developed with Oracle Database, accelerates diverse customer workloads, with up to 16 million SQL read IOPS, more than 560 GB/second of SQL throughput, and SQL read latency under 19 microseconds.

Automation simplifies management

Built-in automation of Oracle best practices for resource management, system tuning, and full-stack patching delivers fast, predictable results for important customer databases. As a result, IT departments achieve up to 59% lower operational support costs, as highlighted in Wikibon’s analysis of Exadata X8M TCO (PDF).

High availability improves uptime

Exadata X8M’s fault-tolerant design and optional resiliency software allow organizations to achieve “five-nines” availability (PDF) for business-critical databases when deployed as part of an Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) solution.

Built-in integration lowers costs

Exadata X8M’s full-stack design eliminates integration costs and reduces customer TCO by up to 33%, as highlighted in Wikibon’s analysis (PDF).

Leadership performance

Low-latency accelerates transaction processing

Application-transparent use of PMEM in Exadata X8M storage servers accelerates crucial customer transactional Oracle Database workloads with 19 microsecond read latencies, ultra-fast log writes, and up to 16 million read SQL IOPS per rack.

High-throughput speeds analytics

High-throughput RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) internal networking reduces system latencies so customers can rapidly process data with up to 560 GB/s throughput from all-flash storage and 1 TB/s with scale-out Oracle Database In-Memory capabilities.

Intelligent storage improves workload performance

Exadata X8M offloads SQL queries, in-memory analytics, and machine learning algorithms from database servers to up to 19 intelligent storage servers per rack to accelerate diverse customer workloads.

Automated management optimizes results

IO Resource Manager automatically optimizes resource allocations and prioritizes IOs to deliver consistently fast results for all types of customer database workloads in consolidated environments.

Smart Flash Cache

Up to 358 TB of NVMe flash cache per rack gives customers the performance of flash storage with the capacity and cost of disk storage by eliminating up to 95% of all disk IOs.

Scalability

Scale-out architecture enables easy growth

Exadata X8M’s scalable design lets customers size initial deployments to meet current needs and add incremental database and storage servers to support new or increasing requirements.

Scalable database processing runs demanding workloads

Database processing power scales by up to 144X, from 48 to 6,912 CPU cores, so customers can meet the needs of demanding workloads and reduce IT complexity by consolidating Oracle Database infrastructure.

Scalable storage enables large databases

Exadata X8M’s storage capacity scales by up to 180X, from 75 TB of usable uncompressed disk storage capacity to over 12.5 PB. Customers can create multipetabyte data warehouses that efficiently run analytics and machine-learning algorithms in intelligent storage servers.

All-flash storage scaling accelerates latency-sensitive workloads

All-flash capacity in intelligent Exadata storage servers scales by more than 160X, from 22TB to over 3.7PB of usable uncompressed capacity, so customers can increase the data intensity of latency-sensitive transactional workloads and support more end users.

Consolidation reduces management workloads

Consolidating diverse workloads with Oracle Multitenant on Exadata X8M enables organizations to reduce IT workloads because there are fewer databases and stand-alone systems to manage.

High availability

No single point of failure increases uptime

Exadata X8M’s fully redundant, fault-tolerant design reduces unplanned downtime compared to DIY solutions, as described in DSC’s analysis (PDF), so customers can continue 24/7 operations across failures.

Persistent memory mirroring increases reliability

Latency-sensitive data written to persistent memory in Exadata X8M is automatically mirrored on multiple storage servers so crucial database log writes for customer databases are always protected.

Storage mirroring increases data availability

Oracle Automatic Storage Management mirrors permanent data storage across two or three storage servers to maximize the performance and availability of customer databases.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) increase availability

Oracle RAC transparently scales crucial customer Oracle Database instances across multiple servers to enable higher performance and protect against database server failures.

Proactive fault management reduces failures

AI-based fault detection helps identify potential problems with customer database infrastructure and mitigate them before they impact operations.

Strong security

Full-stack patching simplifies security updates

Monthly deployment of pretested patch sets for Exadata X8M hardware, software, and firmware enable customers to quickly address security issues for all their Exadata systems. IT teams reduce patching workloads by up to 98% compared to do-it-yourself, multivendor database platforms, according to DSC’s analysis (PDF).

Consolidation reduces attack points

Exadata X8M consolidates customer databases and infrastructure into fewer externally accessible components, reducing the available surface area that hackers can potentially attack.

End-to-end encryption protects privacy

Oracle Advanced Security fully encrypts customer databases while they are at rest, in motion, and protected in backups, so unauthorized access does not reveal information.

Least-privileged administration limits access

Role-based administration restricts IT team members’ access to the Exadata database stack, limiting them to the minimum information required to complete their tasks.

Rapid point-in-time recovery reduces data loss

Continuous protection of customer Oracle Database instances with Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance enables rapid recovery to less than one second before an outage or cyberattack.

Automated management

Automatic indexing optimizes performance

Machine learning (ML) driven updating of Oracle Database indexes quickly adapts to changing workloads so crucial customer workloads run faster and require less manual tuning by DBA teams.

IO Resource Management increases consistency

Automated allocation of IO resources to individual Oracle Database instances based on database type, IO operation, and end user enables diverse customer databases running in a consolidated environment to achieve fast, predictable performance.

Automated monitoring simplifies performance management

Exadata X8M automatically detects CPU, memory, and network issues impacting the performance of customer databases. ML algorithms are then used to determine the root causes of problems, enabling IT teams to operate more efficiently.

Storage fault management minimizes the impact of failures

Automated storage failure detection and rebalancing enables peak performance to be quickly restored for customer databases.

Unsurpassed value

Storage servers increase system performance

Offloading database operations to storage servers enables more CPU cores to work on crucial customer database queries while freeing database servers to handle more OLTP users and complex queries.

Query offload reduces database licensing costs

Customers reduce the number of Oracle Database licenses they need for consolidated workloads, as each licensed core on Exadata X8M database servers completes more work per unit of time and storage server CPUs do not require database licenses.

Converged databases simplify deployments

Exadata X8M’s acceleration of converged Oracle Database capabilities eliminates customer requirements to deploy specialized databases. Multiple database models run within Oracle Database with high Exadata performance, availability, and consistent security.

Database clouds improve consolidation efficiency

High overall Exadata X8M performance, scale, and management automation allow customers to achieve up to 40:1 consolidation of Oracle Database instances to reduce resource over-provisioning, system counts, and TCO.

Capacity on demand (CoD) lowers costs

Exadata X8M's CoD licensing enables customers to reduce initial costs by starting with as few as 16 Oracle Database licenses on eighth-rack systems or 28 licenses on quarter-rack systems. Customers can increase the number of licenses enabled to closely align costs with workload demands.

Cloud integration accelerates digital transformations

The same Oracle Exadata capabilities are available on-premises, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and as Cloud@Customer solutions. Customers can lift-and-shift crucial workloads to cost-effective cloud environments with minimum effort.

Exadata software highlights

Oracle Multitenant improves consolidation efficiency

Oracle Multitenant enables customers to simplify database management and lower costs by consolidating up to 4,096 pluggable databases per container database on Exadata X8M, 16X more than on other systems.

Oracle Database In-Memory accelerates analytics

Oracle Database In-Memory on Exadata X8M simultaneously creates optimized row and column database formats within a single database instance. Dual database formats allow customers to quickly perform real-time analytics on production OLTP databases.

Oracle Machine Learning increases insights

Oracle Machine Learning on Exadata X8M enables customers to improve data-driven insights by easily adding machine learning capabilities to existing database applications. Customers can rapidly build and test ML models by eliminating data exports and transformations required to utilized specialized systems.

Hybrid Columnar Compression optimizes data warehouse storage

Unique Oracle Database compression algorithms reduce typical storage requirements and load times for data warehouses by more than 90% (PDF).

Real-time remote replication increases resiliency

Oracle Active Data Guard lets customers create hot-standby databases that provide business continuity across system failures. The addition of Far Sync extends this capability to remote data centers so organizations can continue operations during complete outages or disasters at their primary data centers.

Exadata hardware

Exadata X8M-2 eighth rack

Customers achieve high Oracle Database performance with an entry-level Exadata system that delivers up to 1.5M SQL Read IOPS and up to 60 GB/second of SQL throughput. The system includes 48 total CPU cores, 4.5 TB PMEM, and either 22TB of all-flash or 75 TB of HDD usable storage capacity inclusive of 3-way storage mirroring.

Exadata X8M-2 quarter rack and flex configurations

Customers can deploy mid-range to high-end Exadata X8M solutions starting with 3M SQL Read IOPS and up to 120 GB/second of SQL throughput and then add the number of database server and compute servers required to meet company-specific requirements. Start with 96 CPU cores, 4.5TB of PMEM, and either 44TB of all-flash or 150TB of HDD usable storage capacity inclusive of 3-way storage mirroring.

Exadata X8M-8 flex configurations

Customers address requirements for large shared-memory databases with two or three 192-core database servers with up to 6 TB of memory each and up to 14 storage servers per rack.

Extended (XT) storage enable analytics at Hadoop pricing

High-capacity storage servers without PMEM or flash acceleration enable IT teams to build low-cost, scale-out storage for infrequently used data. Ovum reports (PDF) the XT storage has costs similar to that of Hadoop clusters and eliminates the need to secure separate analytics environments or copy data between them.

Multirack configurations

Large enterprises can scale X8M-2 and X8M-8 configurations linearly in performance and capacity with up to 18 system and storage expansion racks to meet enterprise-wide database consolidation needs.

Exadata X8 expansion

Customers can upgrade existing Infiniband-based Exadata X8 systems with additional database servers and intelligent storage servers to economically meet increasing performance and capacity requirements.