Oracle cranks up the flash with Exadata X3 systems

System maker Oracle is not content with the feeds and speeds of its Exadata clusters for running data warehousing and online transaction processing, so co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison announced a fourth generation of machines with substantially expanded main and flash memory. Ellison says this will allow for companies to keep …

[Steve Davies 3]

And how much will the software cost then?

For a $200,000 Base price for the H/W I'd fully expect about £1M a year in software licenses.

how else will Larry afford that new mega yacht then?

[Matt Bryant]

Re: And how much will the software cost then?

"......how else will Larry afford that new mega yacht....." This is a defensive measure, more about making sure Larry still has a yatch to sail in. It's about locking Oracle DB customers in and stopping them looking at alternatives such as MariaDB on RHEL, MS SQL on WIndows, or PostgreSQL on just about anything, hence the incomplete figure of $200K. Saying that it will actually cost millions would send customers scurrying to Raleigh and Redmond.

/YEEAAARRGGH, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And how much will the software cost then?

Yachts? What is Larry, a lowly multi-millionaire? Yachts are so 2002. He is on to buying islands now. Look out, he is going to walk into David Cameron's office with a real estate agent.

[flashdba]

In Memory != Exadata

"Ellison says this will allow for companies to keep most of their databases in memory"

Oh yeah? Then why pay all that money in Exadata storage licenses (which are licensed per disk)?

And as for including 10x compression in the capacity figures... Meh.

[KevinDucote]

Re: In Memory != Exadata

"Oh yeah? Then why pay all that money in Exadata storage licenses (which are licensed per disk)?

And as for including 10x compression in the capacity figures... Meh."

"almost" is the key word.

There are data application hardly accessed but still needs to be stored. For frequently used data, it is likely in memory and/or in flash.

[Nate Amsden]

why not SPARC CPUs?

Why isn't Oracle using those new T4 or T5 or whatever they are CPUs in these boxes? They are supposed to be good right? Doesn't make sense - is there some software they wrote for x86 that they haven't ported yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: why not SPARC CPUs?

The SPARC version is called the SPARC Super Cluster. It runs both the Exadata and Exalogic as well as allows you to create LDOMs for general purpose usage. Oracle doesn't seem to do a very good job at advertising this unless you are an existing SPARC customer. As to why they offer both. I suspect it's to go after both markets, but also allow customer choice and not need to do any possibly porting/data conversion between architectures.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle panics over IMDB...exposes X3-2 customers to database corruption risk

So tell us Larry...

Everyone who knows in-memory database (IMDB) technology knows that you MUST have true memory RAS features in order to guarantee ACID compliance in the event of DRAM failure. This is why ALL enterprise class IMDBs use only Intel's E7 family procs.

SAP (HANA), IBM (SolidDB), Oracle TimesTen and Exalytics ALL require Intel E7 family procs because of the risk of data corruption. "Exadata X3-2" is the first and only IMDB that lacks memory subsystem RAS and therby, exposes Oracle customers to data corruption.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDLn5oGBPok

How does Oracle explain this away? Being as far behind on IMDB as Oracle is, I can understand the need to put SOMETHING out there, but really...IMDB on procs without memory RAS? That's equivalent to running a database on a RAID-5 array of USB thumb drives!