After watching the webcast in which Larry Ellison unveiled their new “Sun Oracle Database Machine”, I was left wondering what the news was. Let’s summarize:
- There’s a bundle of Sun hardware and Oracle software that’s called the Exadata v2. Or “Sun Oracle Database Machine”, and a bunch of other names.
- It is built up of storage servers and database servers, connected via Infiniband switches
- The database servers are Sun Fire X4170‘s, with two quad-core CPU’s. Interestingly, these are not maxed out; according to Oracle these use 72GB of memory each, instead of the 144GB listed as the maximum capacity.
- The storage servers are not the rumored F5100 machines; instead, they are using X4275 machines.
But the most interesting detail was left out of all documentation. The webcast was supposed to detail the “innovative FlashFire technology” that is supposedly in the storage servers;
Each Exadata cell comes with 384 GB of Smart Flash cache. This solid state non-volatile flash delivers dramatic performance advantages with Exadata storage. It provides a ten-fold improvement in response time for reads over regular disk; a hundred-fold improvement in IOPS for reads over regular disk; and is a less expensive higher capacity alternative to memory. Overall it delivers a ten-fold increase performing a blended average of read and write IOPS across Smart Flash and regular disk.
Sun Fire X4275
The problem is that there is no information about the “Flash cache”. Not on Oracle’s site. Not at sun.com either; or my search skills have just gotten a lot worse. The tech specs for the X4275 are full of impressive stuff, but the only Flash option is the option to use SSD drives instead of standard disks in the normal disk slots.
The Oracle documentation explicitly mentions being able to use 12 disks per storage server, so my guess is that the Flash module is using one or both PCI-e slots in the machine. If anyone has more details, I’d love to hear them!
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