Oracle hardware and software systems - open topic
We open the topic - because within the framework of one article, it is possible to tell about eight different Oracle software and hardware complexes only in the format of the “topic discovery”. Therefore, today we will "run through" Exadata, Exalogic, SuperCluster, Exalytics, Database Appliance, Big Data Appliance, Private Cloud Appliance and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and in other materials we will discuss each product line separately and in detail.
In fact, the term “software and hardware systems”, which we will use in this article, is not quite correct, because any computer system is, by definition, software and hardware systems. It is more correct to speak about optimized software and hardware complexes. Because each software and hardware complex is the result of the most thorough design, selection of components, software configuration, configuration of the solution with functionality and, of course, optimization.
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Hardware and software are designed, tested and debugged together. And if you know on which hardware the applications will run, then you can achieve the highest performance, the likelihood of “surprises” from the incompatibility of components becomes less, and providing support is easier. Customers do not have to select and optimize components - servers, disks, processors, network components, memory, etc. Install and configure software, test the performance of each server, do their subsequent updates, etc. also not necessary. Significantly simplified maintenance of IT infrastructure. This is precisely the idea of ​​the hardware and software systems that Oracle has begun to create since 2008 — independently developing software and hardware configurations to achieve the highest performance.
Exadata machines were the debut of Oracle in the genre of software and hardware systems. Exadata is a machine designed exclusively for the execution of an Oracle DBMS. It is used for OLTP workloads, for data warehouses, for mixed workloads, for consolidating applications based on Oracle Database. At the hardware level, Exadata, depending on the configuration, is a fast disk subsystem and a 40-gigabit Infiniband network, as well as a multi-terabyte RAM memory and a FLASH memory of tens of terabytes. That is, from the hardware point of view, these are very fast and powerful machines.
But the most important feature of the Exadata architecture is the so-called cells (Fig. 1). Each Exadata cell is a standalone server with 12 disks and special Exadata Software. Exadata cells are not just storage servers, they can perform many operations on their own. These are operations that are made in the traditional architecture by the Oracle DBMS itself - thus, the database servers are unloaded for other operations. Not always obvious, but very important point - many resource-intensive queries require transferring large amounts of data from disks over the network to Oracle database servers for processing. In the case of cells, it is often possible to filter out obviously unnecessary data directly on the storage system in order to transfer to the DBMS only an insignificant part of the original data volume was required. This allows in some cases to increase the performance of queries tens and hundreds of times. The cells are not directly interconnected, which allows you to parallelize requests without overhead. The number of cells in the system is unlimited, while the data is “spread” between many cells of Exadata.
It is important to understand that even if you independently assemble a similar hardware complex on the hardware of Oracle or other manufacturers, you cannot create a system based on it that is similar to Exadata. The fact is that the Exadata software, which is responsible for most of the advantages of Exadata, including hybrid column compression, storage indexes, working with FLASH cards, etc., comes only with Exadata. Thanks to the optimization that Exadata complexes use and the use of Exadata Software, the system as a whole works several times faster than any similar, but usual, non-optimized configurations.
The Oracle Database Appliance is a software and hardware complex that was initially focused on small and medium businesses, as it is understood in the United States. The emphasis is on ease of use. Database Appliance users are those who need to quickly and easily deploy an Oracle DBMS in a fault-tolerant configuration while minimizing the cost of maintaining it. After the customer acquires the Database Appliance, the system downloads the software from the Oracle website, installs and configures it. As a result, the user gets a ready-made failover cluster, which currently (configuration X5-2) consists of two nodes, each of which has two 18-core processors and 256 GB of RAM (if desired, you can expand that 768 GB). ODA also includes a disk shelf with sixteen 4-terabyte drives (a total of 64 TB of raw space), plus additional SSDs for storing frequently requested data and logs. You can also purchase another disk shelf.
As you understand, quite serious databases can work on such a configuration, so a small business for a Database Appliance is far from the limit. On the other hand, if for your business there are a lot of 72 processor cores, then you don’t need to pay for everything at once - you can start licensing fewer cores (at least two cores), all the rest will be temporarily blocked. When, over time, your business will require additional computing power, you can purchase a license for the required number of cores - and they will be activated. So Database Appliance optimizes customer costs.
Initially, the Oracle Database Appliance was conceived as a machine for an Oracle database, but then customers were able to install an Oracle virtual machine on this configuration and deploy full-fledged solutions on it — with layers of applications, databases, etc. And since the Oracle virtual machine supports partial licensing, it is possible to license one processor cores only for the virtual machine and application servers, others only for the database layer, etc.
Oracle Exalogic is Exadata "the other way around", a similar machine optimized for running an Oracle application layer. Built on Intel architecture, Exalogic offers superior performance for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle applications (such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Utilities, Siebel, etc.) and virtual machines, it is optimized for WebLogic applications.
Exalogic is a very powerful machine. It has up to 30 compute nodes, up to 1080 Xeon cores, and built-in storage for huge amounts of data — a 80 TB ZFS disk array. Of course, the customer can create such a configuration himself, but then he will not have the main thing - the “Enable Exalogic Optimizations” checkbox in the admin panel (Fig. 2). And it includes numerous optimizations and special software, which allows, as in the case of Exadata, to significantly speed up the system, compared to conventional configurations.
Oracle SuperCluster is a machine that combines the capabilities of Exadata and Exalogic on the SPARC platform. In fact, this is a consolidation machine — you can install a database on it, an application layer and configure it all to work together using all the advantages of the SPARC platform, including virtualization, fault tolerance, etc. In this case, the SuperCluster uses Exadata cells to speed up the database. But the greatest advantage can be obtained when a whole system is deployed on one SuperCluster, for example, the Oracle E-Business Suite system, or the SAP system, which consists of application servers and an Oracle database.
Now there are two SuperCluster product lines: one on the T5 processor, the second on the M6 ​​processors. In fig. 3 shows a comparison of the configurations SuperCluster T5-8 and M6-32. One of the main advantages of the SuperCluster M6-32 is a huge amount of RAM, up to 32 TB, as well as 384 processor cores. If your business system is demanding on the number of processors, on the amount of RAM and may not be very well adapted to work in a cluster, then the SuperCluster M6-32 will close all the needs of even such a "whimsical" system.
The Oracle Exalytics machine is designed to accelerate the business intelligence layer. Its main features are the acceleration of Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Essbase due to the use of a large amount of RAM, integration with Exadata, acceleration of reports and planning and budgeting tasks, support for a large number of users, the use of In-Memory technologies: Oracle TimesTen or Oracle Database with option ln-memory.
Exalytics version X5-4 has up to 3 TB of RAM, 72 Intel processor cores, FLASH-storage with a capacity of 4.8 TB and hard drives with a total capacity of 7.2 TB. The Exalytics version T5-8 is an even richer machine, it has 4 TB of RAM, 128 SPARC T5 processor cores and 3.2 TB of FLASH memory. It makes sense to use this enormous computing power with a huge number of simultaneously working users of the analytical system, including to support data warehouses running on alternative platforms and having performance problems.
The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is an infrastructure for the rapid deployment of Oracle VM-based virtual machines. It is an easy-to-use complex that allows you to deploy and manage virtual machines very quickly. Virtual machines are created manually from ISO images or from Oracle VM templates. In the Private Cloud Appliance, for example, you can create a simple virtual machine like an Oracle Linux VM or Solaris VM in one minute, and a 16-node Oracle RAC cluster in about 45 minutes. In addition, OPCA uses the relatively recently acquired Oracle SDN (Software Define Network) system to quickly create and manage virtual networks.
The infrastructure is designed to work with Intel-oriented virtual machines (Linux, Solaris, Windows). You can purchase the minimum two-node configuration and build it up to 25 nodes. The number of processor cores in this maximum configuration will be 900 (36 per node), the amount of memory - 6.4 TB (256 GB per node). The system has a small storage of its own (ZFS Storage), but it is assumed that the virtual machines will use the storage systems that the customer has.
The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is the world's first hardware and software system designed specifically to protect Oracle databases. Recovery Appliance provides continuous protection of business-critical databases, performing all processing of backup processes to minimize the load on production servers. It eliminates the risk of data loss and dramatically reduces the overhead costs associated with data protection on production servers. In addition, the Recovery Appliance scales to protect thousands of databases, ensures end-to-end data validation, and also implements a full data protection lifecycle, including backup to disk, tape backup and remote replication.
New features of the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance are tightly integrated with Oracle DBMS functions and the Recovery Manager (RMAN) utility for backup. The Recovery Appliance implements the architecture of only incremental forever backup to minimize the load on production systems.
The main goal of the Recovery Appliance is to eliminate the loss of critical information in the database. The transfer of real-time transaction logs from Redo to a backup database was first implemented in Oracle Data Guard technology. Recovery Appliance extends this technology to all databases in a simple and cost-effective way. Recovery Appliance offers the same level of data protection as Data Guard for databases where fast switching to a backup database is not required.
The Recovery Appliance system “understands” the internal formats of the Oracle DBMS blocks, which allows for checking the integrity of data at a deep level. The integrity of data in all backups and Redo blocks is automatically checked when they are received by the Recovery Appliance.
Recovery Appliance automates and takes control of all full and incremental backup to tape processes. As an option, 16 Gb / s Fiber Channel adapters can be installed in the Recovery Appliance software and hardware to transfer data directly from the Recovery Appliance to tape libraries using the included highly integrated Oracle Secure Backup management software.
The Oracle Big Data Appliance is (in its maximum configuration) an 18-node cluster with up to 768 GB RAM, 36 Intel processor cores and 48 TB disk storage on each node, designed to run Hadoop or Oracle NoSQL Database. Unlike other software and hardware complexes of Oracle, this system was developed jointly with Cloudera, one of the leading suppliers of the Hadoop distribution.
Today, many companies are faced with the need to process huge amounts of data. They have to do in-depth analysis of customer behavior, plan high-precision advertising, combine and analyze data from many sources, including unstructured ones, fight fraud, etc.
And the last for today. Please do not use tracing paper from English, and do not call hardware and software systems "engineering systems". This is wrong, because in the Russian language engineering systems mean something completely different - electricity, heat and gas supply systems, water supply and sewerage systems, ventilation and air conditioning, lighting and communications. That is why our optimized software and hardware systems are worthy of calling them by their name - after all, they can manage entire cities of engineering systems.
In fact, the term “software and hardware systems”, which we will use in this article, is not quite correct, because any computer system is, by definition, software and hardware systems. It is more correct to speak about optimized software and hardware complexes. Because each software and hardware complex is the result of the most thorough design, selection of components, software configuration, configuration of the solution with functionality and, of course, optimization.
')
Hardware and software are designed, tested and debugged together. And if you know on which hardware the applications will run, then you can achieve the highest performance, the likelihood of “surprises” from the incompatibility of components becomes less, and providing support is easier. Customers do not have to select and optimize components - servers, disks, processors, network components, memory, etc. Install and configure software, test the performance of each server, do their subsequent updates, etc. also not necessary. Significantly simplified maintenance of IT infrastructure. This is precisely the idea of ​​the hardware and software systems that Oracle has begun to create since 2008 — independently developing software and hardware configurations to achieve the highest performance.
Exadata
Exadata machines were the debut of Oracle in the genre of software and hardware systems. Exadata is a machine designed exclusively for the execution of an Oracle DBMS. It is used for OLTP workloads, for data warehouses, for mixed workloads, for consolidating applications based on Oracle Database. At the hardware level, Exadata, depending on the configuration, is a fast disk subsystem and a 40-gigabit Infiniband network, as well as a multi-terabyte RAM memory and a FLASH memory of tens of terabytes. That is, from the hardware point of view, these are very fast and powerful machines.
But the most important feature of the Exadata architecture is the so-called cells (Fig. 1). Each Exadata cell is a standalone server with 12 disks and special Exadata Software. Exadata cells are not just storage servers, they can perform many operations on their own. These are operations that are made in the traditional architecture by the Oracle DBMS itself - thus, the database servers are unloaded for other operations. Not always obvious, but very important point - many resource-intensive queries require transferring large amounts of data from disks over the network to Oracle database servers for processing. In the case of cells, it is often possible to filter out obviously unnecessary data directly on the storage system in order to transfer to the DBMS only an insignificant part of the original data volume was required. This allows in some cases to increase the performance of queries tens and hundreds of times. The cells are not directly interconnected, which allows you to parallelize requests without overhead. The number of cells in the system is unlimited, while the data is “spread” between many cells of Exadata.
It is important to understand that even if you independently assemble a similar hardware complex on the hardware of Oracle or other manufacturers, you cannot create a system based on it that is similar to Exadata. The fact is that the Exadata software, which is responsible for most of the advantages of Exadata, including hybrid column compression, storage indexes, working with FLASH cards, etc., comes only with Exadata. Thanks to the optimization that Exadata complexes use and the use of Exadata Software, the system as a whole works several times faster than any similar, but usual, non-optimized configurations.
Database Appliance
The Oracle Database Appliance is a software and hardware complex that was initially focused on small and medium businesses, as it is understood in the United States. The emphasis is on ease of use. Database Appliance users are those who need to quickly and easily deploy an Oracle DBMS in a fault-tolerant configuration while minimizing the cost of maintaining it. After the customer acquires the Database Appliance, the system downloads the software from the Oracle website, installs and configures it. As a result, the user gets a ready-made failover cluster, which currently (configuration X5-2) consists of two nodes, each of which has two 18-core processors and 256 GB of RAM (if desired, you can expand that 768 GB). ODA also includes a disk shelf with sixteen 4-terabyte drives (a total of 64 TB of raw space), plus additional SSDs for storing frequently requested data and logs. You can also purchase another disk shelf.
As you understand, quite serious databases can work on such a configuration, so a small business for a Database Appliance is far from the limit. On the other hand, if for your business there are a lot of 72 processor cores, then you don’t need to pay for everything at once - you can start licensing fewer cores (at least two cores), all the rest will be temporarily blocked. When, over time, your business will require additional computing power, you can purchase a license for the required number of cores - and they will be activated. So Database Appliance optimizes customer costs.
Initially, the Oracle Database Appliance was conceived as a machine for an Oracle database, but then customers were able to install an Oracle virtual machine on this configuration and deploy full-fledged solutions on it — with layers of applications, databases, etc. And since the Oracle virtual machine supports partial licensing, it is possible to license one processor cores only for the virtual machine and application servers, others only for the database layer, etc.
Exalogic
Oracle Exalogic is Exadata "the other way around", a similar machine optimized for running an Oracle application layer. Built on Intel architecture, Exalogic offers superior performance for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle applications (such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Utilities, Siebel, etc.) and virtual machines, it is optimized for WebLogic applications.
Exalogic is a very powerful machine. It has up to 30 compute nodes, up to 1080 Xeon cores, and built-in storage for huge amounts of data — a 80 TB ZFS disk array. Of course, the customer can create such a configuration himself, but then he will not have the main thing - the “Enable Exalogic Optimizations” checkbox in the admin panel (Fig. 2). And it includes numerous optimizations and special software, which allows, as in the case of Exadata, to significantly speed up the system, compared to conventional configurations.
Supercluster
Oracle SuperCluster is a machine that combines the capabilities of Exadata and Exalogic on the SPARC platform. In fact, this is a consolidation machine — you can install a database on it, an application layer and configure it all to work together using all the advantages of the SPARC platform, including virtualization, fault tolerance, etc. In this case, the SuperCluster uses Exadata cells to speed up the database. But the greatest advantage can be obtained when a whole system is deployed on one SuperCluster, for example, the Oracle E-Business Suite system, or the SAP system, which consists of application servers and an Oracle database.
Now there are two SuperCluster product lines: one on the T5 processor, the second on the M6 ​​processors. In fig. 3 shows a comparison of the configurations SuperCluster T5-8 and M6-32. One of the main advantages of the SuperCluster M6-32 is a huge amount of RAM, up to 32 TB, as well as 384 processor cores. If your business system is demanding on the number of processors, on the amount of RAM and may not be very well adapted to work in a cluster, then the SuperCluster M6-32 will close all the needs of even such a "whimsical" system.
Exalytics
The Oracle Exalytics machine is designed to accelerate the business intelligence layer. Its main features are the acceleration of Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Essbase due to the use of a large amount of RAM, integration with Exadata, acceleration of reports and planning and budgeting tasks, support for a large number of users, the use of In-Memory technologies: Oracle TimesTen or Oracle Database with option ln-memory.
Exalytics version X5-4 has up to 3 TB of RAM, 72 Intel processor cores, FLASH-storage with a capacity of 4.8 TB and hard drives with a total capacity of 7.2 TB. The Exalytics version T5-8 is an even richer machine, it has 4 TB of RAM, 128 SPARC T5 processor cores and 3.2 TB of FLASH memory. It makes sense to use this enormous computing power with a huge number of simultaneously working users of the analytical system, including to support data warehouses running on alternative platforms and having performance problems.
Private Cloud Appliance
The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is an infrastructure for the rapid deployment of Oracle VM-based virtual machines. It is an easy-to-use complex that allows you to deploy and manage virtual machines very quickly. Virtual machines are created manually from ISO images or from Oracle VM templates. In the Private Cloud Appliance, for example, you can create a simple virtual machine like an Oracle Linux VM or Solaris VM in one minute, and a 16-node Oracle RAC cluster in about 45 minutes. In addition, OPCA uses the relatively recently acquired Oracle SDN (Software Define Network) system to quickly create and manage virtual networks.
The infrastructure is designed to work with Intel-oriented virtual machines (Linux, Solaris, Windows). You can purchase the minimum two-node configuration and build it up to 25 nodes. The number of processor cores in this maximum configuration will be 900 (36 per node), the amount of memory - 6.4 TB (256 GB per node). The system has a small storage of its own (ZFS Storage), but it is assumed that the virtual machines will use the storage systems that the customer has.
Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance
The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is the world's first hardware and software system designed specifically to protect Oracle databases. Recovery Appliance provides continuous protection of business-critical databases, performing all processing of backup processes to minimize the load on production servers. It eliminates the risk of data loss and dramatically reduces the overhead costs associated with data protection on production servers. In addition, the Recovery Appliance scales to protect thousands of databases, ensures end-to-end data validation, and also implements a full data protection lifecycle, including backup to disk, tape backup and remote replication.
New features of the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance are tightly integrated with Oracle DBMS functions and the Recovery Manager (RMAN) utility for backup. The Recovery Appliance implements the architecture of only incremental forever backup to minimize the load on production systems.
The main goal of the Recovery Appliance is to eliminate the loss of critical information in the database. The transfer of real-time transaction logs from Redo to a backup database was first implemented in Oracle Data Guard technology. Recovery Appliance extends this technology to all databases in a simple and cost-effective way. Recovery Appliance offers the same level of data protection as Data Guard for databases where fast switching to a backup database is not required.
The Recovery Appliance system “understands” the internal formats of the Oracle DBMS blocks, which allows for checking the integrity of data at a deep level. The integrity of data in all backups and Redo blocks is automatically checked when they are received by the Recovery Appliance.
Recovery Appliance automates and takes control of all full and incremental backup to tape processes. As an option, 16 Gb / s Fiber Channel adapters can be installed in the Recovery Appliance software and hardware to transfer data directly from the Recovery Appliance to tape libraries using the included highly integrated Oracle Secure Backup management software.
Big Data Appliance
The Oracle Big Data Appliance is (in its maximum configuration) an 18-node cluster with up to 768 GB RAM, 36 Intel processor cores and 48 TB disk storage on each node, designed to run Hadoop or Oracle NoSQL Database. Unlike other software and hardware complexes of Oracle, this system was developed jointly with Cloudera, one of the leading suppliers of the Hadoop distribution.
Today, many companies are faced with the need to process huge amounts of data. They have to do in-depth analysis of customer behavior, plan high-precision advertising, combine and analyze data from many sources, including unstructured ones, fight fraud, etc.
And the last for today. Please do not use tracing paper from English, and do not call hardware and software systems "engineering systems". This is wrong, because in the Russian language engineering systems mean something completely different - electricity, heat and gas supply systems, water supply and sewerage systems, ventilation and air conditioning, lighting and communications. That is why our optimized software and hardware systems are worthy of calling them by their name - after all, they can manage entire cities of engineering systems.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/267709/
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