Oracle Exalogic

History

Oracle Corporation announced Exalogic at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in September 2010. The company presented it as a continuation of the Oracle-engineered systems product-line which had started in 2008 with Exadata (preconfigured database cluster).

Exalogic is a factory assembled 19-inch rack of 42 rack units, completed with servers and network equipment. There are 4 configurations, at different prices, depending on what fills the rack.{{cite web | access-date = September 17, 2013 The weight of the full rack is about 1 ton (more than 2000 lbs), a quarter rack weighs half as much.

Hardware

The hardware component of the X2-2 appliance consisted of: a group of 1-unit Intel Xeon servers, each equipped with two six-core 2.93 GHz processors and two solid-state drives for operating system and swap space; a common storage area network; and a set of InfiniBand and Ethernet switches.{{cite web | access-date = 2011-05-29 |access-date = September 17, 2013 |url-status= dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110409151600/http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/oracle-exalogic-x2-2-ds-349921.pdf | archive-date = April 9, 2011 An X3-2 model was announced in 2012 with newer processors and more memory. Since late 2013 an X4-2 model is commercially available, it has yet more processor cores and four times as large capacity of solid-state drives.{{cite web |access-date = 2014-01-01 |archive-date = 2014-01-01 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140101040323/http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/oracle-exalogic-cloud-x4-2-consolidated,1-1498.html |url-status = dead The latest version of Exalogic compute nodes have two Intel E5-2699v3 2.3 GHz Xeon (18-core) processors and eight 32 GB DDR4 2133 MHz RAM for a total of 256 GB per node. Two 400 GB SSDs (RAID1) and redundant power supplies

Software

Two 64-bit operating systems run on the server nodes of the appliance: Oracle Linux version 5.5 or Solaris 11. All servers have an installed cluster configuration of Oracle WebLogic Server and distributed memory cache Oracle Coherence. To run Java applications on a machine there is a choice of HotSpot or JRockit. Management of the appliance is available in the Oracle Enterprise Manager toolset, which is also pre-installed in the appliance. A transaction monitor Tuxedo{{cite web | access-date = 2011-05-29 | url-status = dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110409151556/http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/oracle-exalogic-sw-ds-349920.pdf | archive-date = 2011-04-09

Customers

Exalogic is deployed by the University of Melbourne, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, Amway, the Hyundai Motor Group, Bank of Chile, Haier, and Deutsche Post DHL, Public Authority of Minors Affairs (PAMA) in Kuwait .

Criticism

Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, presumes that any appliance principally lacks scalability for the end-user compared with the infrastructure, supplied as service, and notes that the Exalogic approach is actually a rollback to the obsolete mainframe computer concept.{{cite web | access-date = 2011-05-31 |access-date = 2011-05-31 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120812041700/http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/why-the-oracle-exalogic-cloud.php |archive-date = 2012-08-12

References

References

1. Pedro Hernandez. (October 4, 2012). "Oracle Debuts Exalogic X3-2 Server". Server Watch.
2. (March 6, 2013). "Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2". Data Sheet.
3. "Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2".
4. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/21/oracle_ellison_exa_cluster_apple_ibm/ Are Oracle's Exadata racks fluffing Apple's iCloud?]
5. [http://blogs.oracle.com/fusionmiddleware/entry/recap_day_1_oracle_highlights OpenWorld Recap Day 1: Innovations in Oracle Fusion Middleware, Exalogic, Cloud Application Foundation]