Oracle Launches Exadata Exascale for Cloud Database Performance

Oracle today announced the general availability of Exadata Exascale, an intelligent data architecture for the cloud that provides extreme performance for all Oracle Database workloads—including AI vector processing, analytics, and transactions—at any scale. Exadata Exascale dramatically reduces costs for organizations of any size to take advantage of Oracle Exadata’s unique built-in performance, reliability, availability, and security capabilities. Exadata Exascale is now available with the Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure and Oracle Database 23ai on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It will be available in Exadata Cloud@Customer, OCI Dedicated Region, and multicloud environments in the future.

“Exadata Exascale is Exadata reimagined for a multi-tenant, hyper-elastic cloud and is the future architecture for all Oracle Database cloud services,” said Kothanda Umamageswaran, senior vice president, Exadata and Scale-Out Technologies, Oracle. “By reducing infrastructure costs by up to 95 percent, Exadata Exascale makes it possible for small workloads and small businesses to leverage the benefits of Oracle Exadata for Oracle Databases in the cloud.”

Exadata Exascale is a new way for customers to use Exadata Cloud Infrastructure. It provides users with an intelligent data architecture that consists of virtualized database-optimized infrastructure on pools of shared compute and storage, which enables hyper-elastic scaling and pay-per-use economics. As a result, organizations of any size can utilize the industry-leading Exadata database platform to accelerate innovation for all data workloads starting at hundreds of dollars per month.

“Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure is the most flexible database environment we have ever worked with,” said Luis Mediero, director, Cloud and Data Solutions, Quistor. “Its ability to scale efficiently will allow us to move all workloads to high-performance environments with minimal migration time. Because it leverages Exadata technology, we also have confidence in our data resiliency and security, something that has proven difficult to achieve in other environments. In addition, Exascale’s scalability will enable us to grow resources quickly and with minimal costs as our business expands.”

With Exadata Exascale, customers benefit from a unique and intelligent data architecture that provides:

• Elastic, pay-per-use resources: With Exascale, resources are completely elastic and pay-per-use, with no extra charge for IOPS. Users only specify the number of database server ECPUs and storage capacity they need, and every database is spread across pooled storage servers for high performance and availability, eliminating the need to provision dedicated database and storage servers. This reduces the cost of entry-level infrastructure for Exadata Database Service by up to 95 percent and enables flexible and granular on-line scaling of resources.

• Intelligent storage cloud: With Exascale, Oracle delivers the world’s only RDMA-capable storage cloud. This intelligent storage cloud distributes databases across all available storage servers and uses data aware, intelligent Smart Scan to make thousands of CPU cores available to speed up any database query. In addition, data is replicated on three different storage servers to provide high levels of fault tolerance. Exascale Storage Cloud intelligently moves hot or frequently accessed data from disk to memory or flash, and delivers the performance of DRAM, the IOPs of flash, and the capacity of disks.

• Intelligent AI: Exascale uses AI Smart Scan, a unique way to offload data and compute-intensive AI Vector Search operations to the Exascale intelligent storage cloud. AI Smart Scan and Exadata System Software 24ai run key vector search operations up to 30X faster enabling customers to run thousands of concurrent AI vector searches in multi-user environments.

• Intelligent OLTP: Intelligent communication between servers enables high-performance database scaling across the Exascale Virtual Machine clusters, and intelligent, low-latency OLTP IO quickly completes mission-critical transactions and supports more concurrent users. Exadata Exascale delivers 230X more throughput than other database cloud services—2,880 GB/s compared to up to 21 GB/s for other hyperscalers. It also delivers 50X lower latency, with 17 microseconds compared to 1,000 microseconds for other cloud providers.

• Intelligent analytics: Unique data intelligence automatically offloads data-intensive SQL queries to the Exascale intelligent storage cloud, enabling extreme throughput scaling for analytics. Automatic columnarization converts data into an ultra-fast in-memory columnar format that automatically uses flash caches in the Exascale intelligent storage cloud to increase capability and performance.

• Database-aware intelligent clones: Users can instantly create full copies or thin clones using the Exascale intelligent storage cloud and its redirect-on-write technology.  Advanced snapshot capabilities make creating space-efficient clones of pluggable or container databases easy using read-write sources. These development, test, or recovery copies are immediately available and have the same native Exadata performance and scale as the source databases.

“The emphasis on data to drive enterprise success, especially in the age of AI, and broad-based movement of enterprise data to the public cloud suggest that there is an excellent opportunity, even a mandate, for a data infrastructure approach that takes maximum advantage of the dynamism and flexibility that the public cloud platform represents. This suggests a novel data architecture designed specifically for the cloud,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, Data Management Software, IDC. “Oracle has stepped up with Exadata Exascale. Oracle, of course, has well-established credibility in the database realm and a proven ability to execute on database demands and opportunities. Its long-time mission-critical database system, Exadata’s high-performance, and the flexibility of Oracle’s gen 2 cloud infrastructure have enabled Oracle to deliver a comprehensive, intelligent data architecture that combines Exadata and cloud benefits with pay-per-use, a near-infinite resource pool, and hyper-elasticity affordable for any size organization. With Exascale, Oracle has put forth the challenge. Who will respond?”