M-A-O-L

Oracle buying WebOS from HP to power Exadata? Well not exactly, but still interesting rumour – what would Oracle do with WebOS?

Exadata Mini is the Oracle DB Appliance (ODBA?), as Oracle announced now.

It turns out that Oracle’s new small appliance isn’t really an Exadata Mini-Me. Rather, the Oracle Database Appliance is — well, it seems to be a box with an Oracle DBMS in it. Plus Oracle RAC and so on.

via Oracle Database Appliance soundbites and Database Appliance for the Masses.

Oracle Openworld must be close, because the rumour mill starts heating up… Piper Jaffray is predicting that Oracle will release an Exadata Mini machine that will fit under ones desk (via DBMS2). And Jean-Pierre Dijcks compiled a list of Big Data related sessions at Openworld, Big Data may very well be the key note topic, I hear, so it’s worth spending some time at these sessions.

You don’t have to wait for long… Oracle Introduces Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, just days after I blogged about it at Forthcoming Oracle Appliances. Configurations from half rack to several full racks can be combined for massive storage. Interesting that Oracle wants us to use this not only for relational data but all sorts or other stuff as well:

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is ideal for storing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data including historical relational data; backups of Oracle Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files

Curt Monash about Forthcoming Oracle appliances, based on information from Oracle’s earnings call (full transcript) last week. There will be an IMDB appliance based on TimesTen for high speed analytics, and a Hadoop appliance for MapReduce jobs, targetted at data preprocessing and feeding into Oracle. It really looks like Oracle is full steam ahead on the appliance strategy, and is also starting to embrace the MapReduce and massively parallel models. All of that is likely to be announced in more details at Oracle Open World.

At times it’s difficult to judge what things are really about. Look at the following announcement by the folks at Nutanix. They got Aster Data, Google File System and Oracle Storage Layer (incl. Exadata, they say) background, but what’s the point of this appliance? Hope we’ll soon here more from them.

The key to Nutanix is virtualization, which provides the abstraction and the additional storage connections necessary to give Nutanix the performance edge it claims. The company is big on solid-state drives for performance and consolidation, but Pandey says that legacy storage systems are limited to the amount of SSDs they can handle. With a virtualized computing layer, however, each virtual server and each physical node provide the requisite housing and connection to an additional SSD. The Nutanix appliance combines both SSDs and hard disk drives to achieve maximum levels of performance and affordability, Pandey said.

via Nutanix Gets $13.2M for Google-like Storage Architecture.

Now that’s a thing: Kevin Closson Joins EMC Data Computing Division To Focus On Greenplum Performance Engineering! Kevin’s been the public voice of Exadata in the blogosphere for much of four years, so that’s quite a loss for the folks at Oracle. And a big win for EMC, I would say. Good luck, Kevin!

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g has been out for some time now, and articles were piling up that I wanted to write about… so here you go:

• What’s new in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Exadata V2
• Differences between EM10g and EM11g, this article is more on the sysadmin / OEM admin side
• OEM 11g pictures demo in full, some screenshots and explanations of using OEM 11g for DB tuning

Be warned – that’s just for the die-hard Oracle guys!

After yesterday’s Exalogic announcement, Oracle now also announced a good chunk of updates on Exadata. Not a v3, though, but Exadata X2-8 does sound like a winner for those who need the single-node performance of an 8 socket (at 8 cores each) DB server box with 2TB of RAM. Wow! The X2-2 edition is more like a v2.1 of the v2 edition, biggest change seems to be 6 core CPUs instead of 4 core CPUs, and more RAM.

Alex Gorbachev is updating his Pythian blog with details as they emerge: Oracle Exadata Database Machine x2-8 vs x2-2 Deathmatch.

As expected, Larry Ellison announced Oracle’s new Middleware appliance at OpenWorld yesterday – Oracle Exalogic features 30 servers, Infinibad, Flash storage. More about the announcement in eWeeks’s Oracle’s Ellison Introduces Exalogic: New Cloud-in-a-Box System. Supposedly there’s also an OLTP appliance announcement due today – could be Exadata v3 that everybody’s been talking about?

On a side note, Oracle also announced that it’s breaking compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and that in fact it’s been testing its own application on its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux instead of Oracle Enterprise Linux. More analysis available at the 451 Group’s blog.