Exadata Storage Expansion Rack Briefly

By Richard Niemiec on June 17, 2013


As of July 2011, Oracle added an Exadata Storage Expansion Rack that allows you to grow storage capacity of the X2-2 and X2-8 by connecting to it via InfiniBand. This addition is great news for those who are looking to have Petabytes of information. It is also welcome news for those who would like to store more of their archived-to-tape data on disk. It has 18 additional storage servers with 216 CPU cores, 6.75T of Flash Cache (around 1.9M flash IOPs), 216 – 2T 7.2K RPM SAS, drives (432T of raw disk space, roughly 194T of mirrored uncompressed usable capacity). Used for an on-disk backup, Exadata Storage Expansion Rack has a speed of around 27T/hour.

Exadata Storage Server software uses the following features:

  • Smart Scan technology
  • Smart Flash Cache
  • Storage indexes
  • Hybrid columnar compression
  • IORM/DBRM both available
  • Smart Scans of data mining model scoring
  • Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
  • Backup with RMAN
  • Restores using Flashback technologies
  • Redundant power and InfiniBand switches

In July 2011, Oracle’s e-mail system was on nine Exadata racks. Here’s what’s possible:

  • 32 × X2-8s (64-node RAC cluster maximum at this time):
    • 4096 CPUs on the compute servers
    • 5376 CPUs on the storage servers
    • 32 X2-8’s (10.7P on the compute servers)
  • It would take 41,227 Storage Expansion Racks to get to the maximum 8E (Exabytes of mirrored uncompressed storage) 11g Database:
    • Compression gives you 80–500+ Exabytes. At 10× compression, you would only need 4,123 Storage Expansion Racks. At 70× compression, you would only need 589 Storage Expansion Racks to get to 8E.
    • About 109,777 years of YouTube storage (730T/year) with 10× compression.
    • Or greater than 1 million years with higher level of compression (current YouTube).
    • 64 bit allows 16E to be in memory (18,446,744,073,709,551,616.

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