Oracle Database Appliance…

 

The Oracle Database Appliance has been released. It looks like a pretty neat bit of kit for the SMB market. It’s listed in a couple of locations, each page with links to different technical docs, so it’s worth looking at both:

Interesting point’s include:

  • It’s a 2 node 11.2.0.2 RAC on Oracle Linux 5.5 implementation.
  • Two 6-core Xeons per node.
  • 96G Memory per node.
  • 12 TB shared disk, but triple-mirrored, so  you have 4TB of storage.
  • Mirrored “Solid-state disks for redo logs to boost performance.” I can see that point generating some discussion. 🙂
  • No hardware upgrade/expansion options.
  • Pay-as-you-grow licensing available.

For the full lowdown, check the technical docs under the top-level links.

If you like the one-vendor-supplies-all approach, this is kinda neat and a lot less complex than a full blow Exadata system.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

9 thoughts on “Oracle Database Appliance…”

  2. Hi.

    An Oracle whitepaper says they are triple mirrored. The fact there are only 4 disks suggests that is crap though, so I guess you are correct. 🙂

    I’ve amended the post. 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

  3. Hmm… So it has “one button patching” but is based on a version of Linux that was released 18 months ago…

  4. Rob: You have to be careful when judging the age of the distribution where Oracle Linux is concerned, because Oracle Linux uses the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), not the RHEL kernel, so you can have a very up to date kernel running on an older distribution.

    For an Oracle server, the most important part of the distribution is the kernel itself, not the other guff like applications. So for example, you can run OL 5.5 with the UEK and have all the performance improvements found in the RHEL kernel in 6.x.

    Cheers

    Tim…

  6. With the ODA, we get 3 disk groups, +DATA (hard disks, high redundancy), +RECO (hard disks, high redundancy), and +REDO (SSD, normal redundancy).

    One of the things that I found interesting regarding the OS was that it was running OEL 5.5 with the RedHat compatible kernel. We’ll have to wait and see whether Oracle supports upgrading to OEL6 or the UEK. If it’s like Exadata, they’re not going to allow it (only X2-8 runs UEK).

    As for the USB, it looks like it only is used for firmware updates. I’m hoping that they’ll start using it like they do on the Exadata storage servers…an easy recovery option to reimage the box. Probably asking a bit much, since you will be able to install your own additional software on the box.

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