Oracle showcased the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 in a webcast last week. The new version provides up to twice the performance and supports over four times the storage of the original Oracle Database Appliance, and allows customers to expand their data volumes instantly by connecting a Storage Expansion Shelf with no administration required.
Recounting the key advantages of the appliance during the webcast, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that the Oracle Database Appliance, launched 18 months ago, offers one button deployment, one button patching, zero admin/storage, automated support and capacity on demand software licensing. According to Hurd, customers have already purchased more than 1,000 units of the Oracle Database Appliance and it is now one of Oracle’s fastest growing engineered systems. The new appliance’s speed and greater storage capacity are significant, he noted, “given how data keeps doubling year after year.”
The Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 supports virtualization so middleware and application workloads can be hosted right next to database workloads, added Hurd. “Any application can run on it now – JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, WebLogic, customer applications – you name it. If it can run on Oracle VM, it can run on this.” The result is that it is a more complete solution in a box, Hurd said. "This means even more value for mid-size companies, departments and branches, and also means great things for our partners. They can pop in their app and deliver their solution onsite to their customers. And, for larger organizations, it complements our other engineered systems like Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC.”
When the first Oracle Database Appliance was first released in late September 2011, customers were excited about the simplicity of the product and its rapid time to value as a complete package of software, server, storage and networking, reflected Sohan DeMel, vice president, product strategy and business development, Oracle, in an interview. But while they appreciated the ease of deployment of the engineered system, they also wanted more performance and more storage so they could apply it to an even broader swath of their applications. That is why the new release is important to customers, agreed DeMel.
New Virtualization Option
In addition to Oracle Database Appliance now suddenly being a database candidate for a much wider footprint of the databases that customers have in their data centers, the new option of a Virtualized Platform, which is built on Oracle VM, provides new opportunities for ISVs and SaaS providers.
The Oracle Database Appliance Virtual Platform reduces software licensing requirements by leveraging Oracle VM’s hard partitioning capabilities, and it also extends pay-as-you-grow software licensing to all Oracle software. The appliance provides a flexible and scalable platform that enables organizations to minimize license costs by automatically pinning the database and application VMs to specific cores, and to maximize value by paying only for capacity used by database and applications.
The virtualization capabilities will be important to organizations that need to quickly deploy complete, highly available solution appliances to remote branch office locations and lines of business where both floor space and IT expertise may be in limited supply, says DeMel. “For example, they could be deploying it in a closet somewhere in a branch office and in that closet they can’t fit an entire rack – installing a whole rack’s worth of hardware is more of a data center capability. They need to be able to put something small there and not only put the database there but also put the web tier, the app tier, the load balancer, everything in there – and have a converged IT footprint.”
The Oracle Database Appliance Virtual Platform reduces software licensing requirements by leveraging Oracle VM’s hard partitioning capabilities, and it also extends pay-as-you-grow software licensing to all Oracle software. The appliance provides a flexible and scalable platform that enables organizations to minimize license costs by automatically pinning the database and application VMs to specific cores, and to maximize value by paying only for capacity used by database and applications.
Oracle has upgraded the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 hardware with 512GB of memory, 18TB SAS disk storage and 800GB flash to enhance performance for online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing. In addition to the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2’s 2X faster performance and over 4X storage capacity, it also offers almost 3X flash; and more than 2.5X the memory over the previous version.
More information is available about the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2. A replay of the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 webcast featuring Hurd as well as DeMel, Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, and others, is available here.