First introduced at Oracle OpenWorld, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, a high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence software and hardware, is now generally available. Oracle Exalytics features Oracle BI Foundation Suite 11.6, which includes 87 new product capabilities and enhancements, and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics, enhanced for an Oracle Sun server designed for in-memory analytics.
Oracle began selling the Exalytics product even before it went GA in late February, said Mark Hurd, Oracle president, during the company's recent third quarter earnings call. Hurd noted that Exalytics has had the fastest launch of any engineered system that Oracle has introduced and is already being well accepted in the U.S. and Europe, and ramping up now in Asia.
"The Oracle Exalytics solution is designed to take maximum advantage of that in-memory capability while also being able to work with the largest data sources as Oracle BI is well-known for, because this is a middle tier solution that runs on top of and complements existing databases, data warehouses, cube-based systems and other data sources," said Paul Rodwick, vice president of BI product management at Oracle. "And so there is the ability for customers to increase their performance and scale and deliver speed-of-thought interactive visual analysis to users while working with the existing data management infrastructure they have - Oracle Database, other databases they have, and Oracle Exadata, in particular."
The new offering is gaining traction among partners, according to Oracle. For example, Amy Mayer, vice president for Oracle Analytics at CapGemini, said that Oracle Exalytics will allow her organization to keep pace with business demands and the speed-of-thought interactive visualizations will provide an optimal user experience. "The amount of information that a business needs to be operationally effective as well as competitive is growing at an exponential rate, while at the same time the variety of analytical requirements are constantly evolving."
Exalytics can be used in heterogeneous IT environments, and can access and analyze data from Oracle or third-party relational, OLAP or other data sources including IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services, SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), and Teradata Warehouse, among others, in any combinations, according to Oracle.
In addition to classic query, reporting and analysis or decision support applications, Oracle Exalytics solution - because it runs Oracle BI Foundation Suite - also offers planning and scenario modeling and what-if analysis applications including Hyperion Planning, stated Rodwick. "For Planning customers, the benefit that they can enjoy is the ability to have much reduced plan cycle time which means that they can recalculate their plans more frequently, they can use larger amounts of detailed data to get to greater plan accuracy, and because the capability for doing what-if and modeling and planning applications is all together with the business intelligence capabilities, they can do reporting on all that as well."
"We have built Exalytics so that it can slip into your existing data warehousing environment - it could be any data warehouse or it could be Oracle Exadata - and to slip into your existing BI apps environment or your existing Hyperion Planning or Profitability and Cost Management environment seamlessly," emphasized Gaurav Rewari, vice president of EPM and BI Product Management at Oracle. "You can put the Exalytics machine underneath your planning application, underneath your BI app which are both functional and industry-specific - so things like sales analytics, financial analytics, as well as industry-specific packaged applications, as well as underneath a custom BI application that you may have built with OBIEE - and it will work right away."
Oracle BI Foundation Suite provides built-in mobile support for iPad and iPhone. As part of an Oracle Exalytics solution, on-the-go mobile analysis scales to support many thousands of concurrent users with interactive responsiveness.
Oracle Exalytics features Oracle's Sun Fire server with 1 terabyte of RAM, Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors with a total of 40 cores, 40 Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity.
For more information about the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, go here.