Oracle Database Appliance
Oracle Database Appliance was introduced by Oracle in September 2011. It is a member of Oracle's family of engineered systems, which refers to a combined hardware and software solution designed to provide a specific function—in this case, a database server. It is a single-box solution that contains the hardware, networking, storage and software needed to build a highly available two-node clustered database server.[1]
Oracle Database Appliance supports application workloads through Oracle Virtual Machine, (OVM), virtualization. The Oracle Database Appliance, with virtualization, provides efficient sharing of the platform with applications, provides capacity-on-demand licensing for both the database and applications, and allows users to dynamically grow and shrink database and application capacity without restrictions.
Oracle Database Appliance virtualization allows developers to build a Solution-In-a-Box that may include an application, middle and database tier using pre-built Virtual Machine templates. There are pre-built Virtual Machine templates for Oracle Enterprise Business Suite, JD Edwards, Business Intelligence, PeopleSoft, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Weblogic Server and others. In-a-Box solutions reduce the total amount of time to deploy complex application environments, especially in remote or branch office locations.[1]
History
Oracle introduced its first Engineered Database System, Oracle Exadata, in 2008. In 2011, it announced the Oracle Database Appliance. The Oracle Database Appliance is smaller than Oracle Exadata, containing less storage, memory and CPUs, at a lower price point.[2] [3] According to industry analysts, Oracle expects the Oracle Database Appliance to fill the gap in its product line beneath Oracle Exadata, targeting mid-market customers.[4]
The first version of Oracle Database Appliance, referred to as Version 1 or V1, was first introduced on September 21, 2011. Version 1 was primarily a highly available database server designed to be extremely simple to install, deploy and manage.
The second generation, X3-2, of Oracle Database Appliance was announced in March 5, 2013 and it significantly increased the computing power by using faster processors with more cores, increased memory and larger raw shared storage resulting in greater usable storage. In addition, it offered an optional Virtualized Platform, and embedded the Oracle Virtual Machine(OVM), which allowed the ODA to be much more than a database server only. With OVM, user defined virtual machines can be created for application and middle tier components and allowed users to create a ‘Solution-in-Box’. With the option to create virtual machines, users gained significant configuration flexibility for a variety of solutions.
The current version of the Oracle Database Appliance is now the X4-2, which was announced December 4, 2013 and included faster Intel processors.
Features
Hardware
Servers: The Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 is a 4 Rack Unit, (RU), system that consists of two servers and one storage shelf. Each server contains two 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 processors, providing up to 24 enabled-on-demand processor cores and 256 GB of memory per server for a total of 48 processor cores and 512 GB of memory per appliance.[1]
Storage: The Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 base configuration
shares twenty 900 GB SAS Hard Disk Drives in a single storage shelf
between the two servers, however, the appliance also supports an
optional storage expansion shelf. The additional storage shelf doubles
the storage capacity of the system for a total of 36 TB of raw storage
that may be double-mirrored or triple-mirrored, offering Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 4 18 TB or 12 TB, respectively, of resilient usable database storage. There are four triple-mirrored 200 GB Solid-State
Disks, (SSD), per storage shelf for the Oracle Database REDO logs to
boost performance and to protect the database in case of instance
failure. To expand storage outside of the appliance, external NFS
storage is supported for online backups, data staging, or extra database files. The Appliance Manager in conjunction with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) automatically configures, manages, and monitors disk performance and availability. The Appliance Manager also provides disk performance and availability. The Appliance Manager also provides alerts on performance and availability events as well as automatically
configuring replacement drives in case of a hard disk failure.[1]
Networking: The two server nodes are connected via a redundant
10GbE interconnect for cluster communication. Each server also provides
the option for 10GbE SFP+ (fiber) or 10GBase-T (copper) external
networking connectivity, ensuring the appliance will be compatible with
any data center.
Software
The Oracle Database Appliance runs Oracle Linux, Oracle Grid Infrastructure for cluster and storage management, and a choice of Oracle Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node, or Oracle RAC. These latter two database products leverage the clustered nature of the hardware to database service failover in the event of a failure. Oracle also provides Oracle Clusterware for high availability monitoring and cluster membership, and Oracle Automatic Storage Management for storage and disk management.[5][1]
Administration
Oracle provides a deployment tool called the appliance manager to simplify the deployment and make it less time consuming.[6] The vendor also provides special patch bundles for the database appliance, consisting of firmware, Linux OS, clustering, storage management, and database patches, which have been tested for compatibility.[1]
Licensing
Customers can choose to license only a subset of the processor cores in the Oracle Database Appliance. This is done by disabling unnecessary processor cores in the BIOS, using a special interface. Cores can be enabled at a later time, allowing customers to increase the capacity of the appliance if required.[7]
This ‘Capacity-on-Demand’ license model allows users to define configurations with just the number of processor cores needed for their workloads and is implemented by disabling unnecessary processor cores in the BIOS, using a special interface. Cores can be enabled at a later time, allowing customers to increase the capacity of the appliance if required,[6] and reducing the initial total cost of implementation.
In bare metal configurations, cores are enabled in increments of 4 cores on each node and with virtualized configurations cores can be enabled in increments of just 2 cores on each node.[1]
Criticism
The Oracle Database Appliance is a fixed configuration as described above. Customers cannot cluster multiple appliances together to create a larger cluster (beyond 2 servers),. If they exceed the storage capacity of the server, customers may add an additional Storage Shelf which will double the amount of raw storage at no performance penalty. Network storage may also be attached and customers can extend their storage to NFS-attached storage.[8]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "Oracle Database Appliance White Paper" (PDF). Oracle. Retrieved 3 June 2014.
- ^ "Oracle Engineered Systems Price List--June 3, 2014" (PDF). Retrieved 3 June 2014.
- ^ Fielding, Marc. "Comparing Oracle Database Appliance and Oracle Exadata". Pythian. Retrieved 27 December 2012.
- ^ Jennings, Tim. "Oracle Applies for Database Simplicity". Ovum. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ Baird, Cathy. "Oracle High Availability and Best Practices". Oracle. Retrieved 27 December 2012.
- ^ Moltzen, Edward. "Oracle Database Appliance: Perfect Time for Sun/Oracle Offspring". CRN.com. Retrieved 27 December 2012.
- ^ Walsh, Larry. "Oracle Goes Small with Database Appliance". Channelnomics. Retrieved 27 December 2012.
- ^ "Oracle Database Appliance Frequently Asked Questions" (PDF). Oracle. Retrieved 3 June 2014.