Oracle Exadata is an enterprise database platform that runs Oracle Database workloads of any scale and criticality with high performance, availability, and security. Exadata’s scale-out design employs optimizations that let transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads run faster. Consolidating diverse Oracle Database workloads on Exadata platforms in enterprise data centers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and multicloud environments helps organizations increase…
$2.90
Per Unit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution mainly used in commercial data centers.
Oracle Exadata is well-suited for environments where massive performance for Oracle databases is required. Storage indexes reduce the unnecessary I/O. Smart Flash Cache accelerates random reads/writes.
Our OLTP application demands very high concurrency. Multi-node Exadata provides high availability and zero downtime during DB patching. It comes with lots of built-in automations, so it reduces many routine tasks for sysadmins, like network, storage, and VM configuration, and it also reduces many Oracle DBA tasks, like Oracle software installation, patching, and upgrades.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is best suited for its stability, fast reboot time, and minimal resource requirements which reduce overall cost. The patch time for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is also extremely fast which benefits application up time. For environments or applications that require many changes, for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support person that is not well trained and experienced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this can be challenging.
Oracle Database : Deliver industry-leading security, high availability and scalability with Oracle Database, which has been significantly enhanced to take advantage of the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers.
Exadata Smart Scan : Improve query performance by offloading intensive query processing and data mining scoring to scalable intelligent storage servers.
Smart Flash Cache : Transparently cache 'hot' read and write data to fast solid-state storage, improving query response times and throughput. Exadata systems use the latest PCI flash technology rather than flash disks. PCI flash delivers ultra-high performance by placing flash directly on the high speed PCI bus rather than behind slow disk controllers.
Hybrid Columnar Compression : Reduce the size of data warehousing tables by 10x, and archive tables by 50x, to improve performance and lower storage costs for primary, standby, and backup databases. Query high, query low, archive high and archive low.
Infiniband Network : Connect multiple Oracle Exadata Database Machines using the InfiniBand fabric to form a larger single system image configuration. Each InfiniBand link provides 40 Gigabits of bandwidth–many times higher than traditional storage or server networks.
Petabyte Scalability : Easily scale data warehouse to support enterprise data growth.
Virtualization, like the operating system level task. I see this product is very good and it blends very well with the middleware components like all the JBoss and other things. And other than that, either you install it or a virtual machine or physical servers, it works seamlessly anywhere. And if you want to go further, like Red Hat OpenShift or those things also work very nice with it.
The process of patching and upgrade of Exadata server components could be improved with a goal to minimize the overall effort, make it fully automated and transparent.
Improved guidelines and possibly more sophisticated tools for sizing of new Exadata servers for migration from old legacy hardware.
In the LEAP process. The upgrading process, which I'm hearing, like I said it before, prior that I was on rail seven, eight, and nine. Trying to get all of that to rail nine and stay current. The LEAP process from seven to eight is a little bit less than desired. I've talked to some people that from once you get on eight from eight to nine to nine to 10 is a breeze. So I'm looking forward to that.
I am comparing Exadata with the Oracle RAC database experience. In addition to Oracle RAC features, Exadata provides automatic performance optimization through Smart Scan and storage indexes. Deep integration with the Oracle ecosystem and tight coupling with Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring and management. Some downsides of Exadata are: a steep learning curve, concepts like cell offloading, IORM, and flash cache behavior aren’t intuitive initially. Operating Exadata requires specialized DBA skills.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro is the simplest enterprise version of Red Hat that is enterprise supported and when you deploy as many VMs as we do, it is vital to have that enterprise support. On top of the enterprise support, having access to a commercially supported backbone for updates and upgrades is a huge plus.
Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
Oracle Exadata Database Machine had the best performance overall hands down. It clearly beat the competition and we were seeing 1000X improvement on SAP HANA. Oracle Exadata Database Machine beat that without us refactoring our code. To achieve that in HANA, we had to refactor the code somewhat. Now this was for our limited POC of 5 use cases. Given the large number of stored procedures we had in Sybase, we need to capture more production metrics but we are seeing incredible performance.
So we in our company have used Ubuntu as well. Sometimes we have to use that because a certain application installer requires that we use that operating system, but we really don't prefer it just because it doesn't come with the same Add-on features that make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) really great, like Red Hat Insights or Red Hat satellite, things like that. They come package with it. So that would be the main one. I've also used things like FreeBSD, but I think that's just too old at this point to care.
Single support from a single vendor with both machine and database from Oracle, which is costing us less.
With Exadata, we need less technical manpower and less technical support. A business transaction with the integrated and centralized database helps us focus on other business needs.
We don't need to buy additional licenses and Hardware for the next 3 to 5 years.
