Up to 2280 cores and 42 TB of RAM per rack: Oracle introduced the Exadata X11M DBMS platform

Oracle has announced a new version of the Exadata DBMS platform. Even in the previous generation, Exadata X10M, Oracle decided to abandon the use of Intel Xeon processors. Exadata X11M focuses on deployment flexibility: on-premise; as a local service managed by Oracle; in third-party clouds, including as part of multi-cloud configurations.

But the performance increase is also stated to be significant: the new generation should demonstrate a 55% increase in the speed of vector search, which is important for training AI models. The data scanning speed has increased by 2.2 times, and the transaction processing speed has increased by a quarter. And in some operations the performance increase reaches 32 times. At the same time, the new platform costs the same as the previous one, Oracle says.

Source hereafter: Oracle

The performance increase is largely due to software optimizations, but the company has also improved the hardware component. The Oracle Exadata X11M is based on AMD EPYC, DDR5-6400, NVMe SSD and dual-port 100G adapters. Each X11M DB server contains two 96-core AMD EPYC processors and 512 GB of RAM, expandable up to 3 TB. However, there is a simpler configuration – the X11M-Z has one 32-core EPYC and 768 GB or 1,152 TB of memory. Exadata makes extensive use of the RDMA engine, including the Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM) caching layer, which consumes most of the RAM.

Data storage servers are presented in three versions: with one (HC-Z) or two 32-core processors (EF and HC) and memory capacity of 768 GB or 1.5 TB, respectively. HC (High Capacity) storage nodes include four caching 6.8 TB NVMe Flash Accelerator F680 v2 (PCIe 5.0) drives and twelve 22 TB SAS HDDs (7200 RPM). EF (Extreme Flash) nodes use four 30.72 TB NVMe SSDs instead of HDDs. And the HC-Z nodes differ from HC in that they have only a pair of 6.8 TB NVMe SSD caching and six 22 TB HDDs.

The minimum configuration of Exadata X11M consists of two database servers and three storage servers. It provides a scanning speed of 135 GB/s and provides 1.9 PB of data storage. The latter is achieved through the use of Oracle Database Hybrid Columnar Compression.

At its maximum configuration, each X11M rack can contain up to 2,880 processor cores, 42 TB of RAM, 462 TB of high-performance flash memory, and 2.2 PB (SSD) or 4.4 PB (HDD) of total disk space. The network part is represented by a RoCE factory based on two-port adapters operating in Active-Active mode. In total, from 3 to 15 database servers and from 3 to 17 data storage servers can be installed in a rack.

The configuration can be expanded with additional racks connected via RoCE interconnect, and mixed options are supported in which Exadata X8M, X9M, X10M and X11M racks work together. Ease of scaling is provided by Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Exadata Exascale and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) technologies.

Today, Exadata X11M is the most advanced database platform, combining the highest performance with Oracle databases, configuration flexibility and wide choice of deployment options, whether using the platform within AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud or placement in the customer’s data center, says Oracle.