Oracle Corporation
11/20/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 11/20/2024 11:53
Why Exadata Exascale is Ideal for Small Enterprise Customers
A common misconception is that Exadata is too expensive and too powerful for small organizations with limited budgets and staff. However, with the availability of Exadata Exascale on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), organizations of all sizes can now benefit from Oracle Exadata's unique capabilities, including enhanced performance, reliability, availability, and security, all at a significantly reduced cost.
Oracle offers two options for enterprises that want to gain the benefits of using Exadata for smaller workloads: Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database. Autonomous Database is a fully automated database service designed to simplify database management by eliminating the need for manual database administration. Organizations with smaller workloads that want the highest possible database management automation can run them on Autonomous Database Serverless.
However, if organizations want to directly manage their virtual machines (VMs) and database instances, Exadata Exascale provides the benefits of Exadata at a much smaller scale. This configuration is ideal for applications and DevOps practices that need greater flexibility in managing databases and VMs, such as controlling access to the database server VMs, installing and managing other software on VMs, and maintaining full administrative control over databases. For organizations looking for a balance between automation and administrative flexibility, Exascale provides a great solution that enables greater control over their database environments. This blog post discusses why a small business customer should consider Exascale as their preferred database platform.
Lower entry cost
Exascale allows customers to create VM clusters with eight ECPUs, 22 GB of memory, and 280 GB of filesystem storage per VM, a minimum of two VMs, and 300 GB of database storage as the smallest configuration. This configuration costs only $4,275 per month with the Oracle licenses included option and $,1293 with the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) pricing option.
With Oracle licenses included, the cost summary incurs the following charges:
Description
Quantity
Unit Price
Monthly Cost
Oracle Exadata Exascale VM filesystem storage (GB) storage capacity per month)
560
0.0425
$23.80
Oracle Exadata Exascale smart database storage (GB storage capacity per month)
300
0.1156
$34.68
Oracle Exadata Exascale RDMA compute infrastructure (ECPU per hour)
16
0.025
$292.00
Oracle Exadata Exascale Database ECPU (ECPU per hour) - License included
16
0.336
$3,924.48
Monthly total
$4,274.96
The Oracle BYOL option offers the following cost summary:
Description
Quantity
Unit Price
Monthly Cost
Oracle Exadata Exascale VM filesystem storage (GB storage capacity per month)
560
0.0425
$23.80
Oracle Exadata Exascale smart database storage (GB storage capacity per month)
300
0.1156
$34.68
Oracle Exadata Exascale RDMA compute infrastructure (ECPU per hour)
16
0.025
$292.00
Oracle Exadata Exascale Database ECPU (ECPU per hour) - License included
16
0.336
$942.58
Monthly total
$1,293.06
Exascale requires a minimum commitment of 48 hours. If you decide to terminate the service after 48 hours, the cost is $335 with the license-included option or $140 for the BYOL option. These options offer a low entry point for organizations looking to try out Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure.
Lower total cost of ownership
By improving resource utilization, dynamic storage provisioning, simplifying management, and delivering superior performance, Exadata Exascale helps organizations reduce their overall database infrastructure costs, making it a cost-effective solution for managing small to large-scale database workloads.
Exascale's integrated and automated management capabilities simplify database administration tasks. With features like intelligent storage management of storage pools, database machine provisioning, and centralized monitoring and management tools, organizations can reduce the time and effort required for routine maintenance and administration. This reduction in administrative overhead translates directly into cost savings.
With Exascale, the ability to consolidate multiple databases onto a single platform can also result in lower overall licensing costs compared to deploying databases on servers and storage that are dedicated to individual databases. Exascale's optimized hardware and software integration is the same that's been available for years with Exadata Database Service. It delivers superior database performance with fast query response times, high transaction throughput, and short batch processing windows, leading to increased user productivity, better utilization of existing resources, and potentially reduced staffing costs.
Scalability and flexibility
Smaller organizations and larger ones with smaller workloads often experience fluctuating or gradual growth in terms of data volume and workload demands. Exascale's scale-out architecture is designed for seamless expansion. It allows database server and storage infrastructure to scale up without concern for server-based size limitations or disruptive migrations. In addition, you can scale Exadata Database Service consumption up or down without interrupting database or application availability, enabling you to meet the needs of dynamic workloads with low costs.
Exascale allows for the instant creation of database and pluggable database clones for development, testing, and other use cases. Clones can be complete copies or space-efficient thin clones and can be made from any live read-write or read-only database without complex prerequisites. You can clone any database and its clones as needed. All databases on Exascale benefit from Exadata's performance, regardless of their intended purpose. This combination of efficient cloning and robust performance makes Exascale suitable for various workloads, enhancing the value of consolidating multiple databases within organizations.
Simplified management and administration
Small organizations often have limited IT staff or rely on generalists who manage various aspects of their infrastructure. OCI and Exascale offers advanced automation, monitoring and management capabilities. OCI's intuitive management interfaces for Exascale infrastructure lower the learning curve required to manage complex database systems.
Exascale eliminates the need for intermediate storage management layers by utilizing a direct I/O path architecture. This architecture allows Oracle Database 23ai to send intelligent data requests directly to storage, resulting in latency as low as 19 microseconds and support for millions of IOPS for both online transaction processing (OLTP) and AI workloads. This advancement reduces administrative overhead and the need for manual performance tuning, allowing small IT teams to quickly and effectively manage Exascale.
Cloud-first approach
Organizations with smaller workloads often prefer cloud-based solutions for their flexibility, ease of deployment, and reduced upfront infrastructure costs. Exascale's built-in cloud native capabilities, such as scalability, backup, and disaster recovery features, make it an attractive option to small organizations.
Sample architecture
The following reference architecture illustrates a deployment of highly available web applications in OCI using Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure. A public load balancer receives client requests from the internet and routes them to a pool of web servers distributed across multiple fault domains. The data tier includes an Oracle Database hosted on Exadata Exascale with a private endpoint. All the benefits of Exascale deployed in OCI come with minimal costs and maximum flexibility.
Example architectural diagram of a deployment of Exascale Database on OCI.
Conclusion
The Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure delivers exceptional performance and features that help meet the needs and constraints of small organizations. Using Exascale infrastructure lets customers take advantage of functionality, scalability, and reliability that are not available on other platforms, all at a lower cost and with easy management. This combination makes Exascale a smart choice for organizations with small to medium-sized workloads looking to address their database needs sin a high-performance, cost-effective manner.
For more information, see the following resources:
Exadata Exascale - World's Only Intelligent Data Architecture for Cloud
Introducing Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure
Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure (technical documentation)
Oracle Exadata Exascale: The World's Only Intelligent Data Architecture for Cloud (video overview)
Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure (service page)