Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 – Review of What’s New

Mar 12, 2013

It’s here! The new Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 was announced by Oracle on March 5^th.

Continuing to provide a complete package of software, server, storage, and networked components to provide a single plug-and-go Oracle infrastructure, the new ODA X3-2 offers many enhancements.

The Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 Hardware Specs

The Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 is a 4U rack-mountable system containing:

Two Oracle Linux servers and one storage shelf
Each server consists of two 8- core Intel Xeon processors E5-2690, 256 GB of memory, and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Base-T external networking connectivity
Servers are interconnected by a redundant 10-GbE interconnect for cluster communication and also share direct-attached high performance SAS storage.
Storage consists of 18 TB of raw storage that’s double-mirrored or triple-mirrored, offering 9 TB or 6 TB, respectively
SSD support consists of four 200 GB solid-state disks for the database redo logs for performance enhancement

Key Advantages of the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2

Storage Expansion

With the optional storage expansion shelf, the raw storage capacity of ODA X3-2 can be doubled from the base 18TB to a total of 36TB.
External NFS storage is supported for backups, data staging, and/or database files.

Virtualization Included – Consolidate Your Database and Other Workloads with ODA

You now have the option of deploying a virtualized environment using Oracle VM (free license with support included at no charge in your ODA support program)
Consolidate both your databases and application on a single server
All Oracle VM certified applications, operating systems, and Oracle VM templates are supported on the ODA X3-2 platform

CPU Isolation and Licensing

By leveraging Oracle VM Hard Partitioning, you can isolate the cpu cores between databases and other workloads. This is a huge new advantage as it allows you to define cores that will require database licenses but still utilize non-database cpu cores for additional workloads.

Buy your Oracle licenses for your “database cores” without leaving the rest of the processing power of ODA sitting idle!

The Engineered System Advantage

With engineered systems, you get an integrated hardware/software infrastructure that is optimized to work together to offer the best performance, reliability, and on-going manageability.

Your business users will appreciate the speed at which data is accessed; your technical team will appreciate patching that does NOT require multi-vendor cross-certification; and your finance team will appreciate the license-as-you-go pricing model.