Exalogic Blurb

Welcome to another, technically focused, blog. I will be writing about some general IT and unix related topics but as my current job is to work on the Oracle Engineered Systems so most postings will relate to these machines and the software that runs on them. In particular Oracle Linux 5 or Solaris 11 running Weblogic and Coherence. Those familiar with the Exalogic will know that it is quite capable of running other software, in particular the full Oracle stack but essentially any software certified for OEL 5 or Solaris (64 bit for both) will run successfully on the platform.

There are a number of machines now available in the Oracle engineered system family. These being:-

• Exadata
  First machine out the door and aimed at running the Oracle database optimally.
• Exalogic
  The "middleware" machine. Optimised for Weblogic, Coherence and Tuxedo in the first place with the Oracle apps following on.
• SPARC SuperCluster
  Exalogic for the fans of the SPARC processor. Bringing the power of the T4 chip together with the ingenuity of the Exadata storage cells so that this machine covers all tiers in a typical enterprise deployment.
• Exalytics
  Perfect machine for running in-memory analysis of data.
• Oracle Database Appliance
  For those who don't need all the power of Exadata but do want the simplicity and manageability of a database appliance.
• Oracle Big Data
  Moving away from the structured data of the traditional SQL database into the world of gathering unstructured data and analysing this. Picking up feeds from the likes of social media applications.

First a very quick summary of what you get when you unwrap the covers from your shiny new engineered system. (For the two I am most interested in - Exalogic and SSC )

• Exalogic (1 rack)
  Up to 30 x86-64 compute nodes. (12 cores per node)
  A ZFS storage appliance. 40Tb raw or ~18Tb actual once mirroring, spares etc. has been done.
  Up to 4 Inifiniband switches to give a superfast backplane network across the machine (These are used to bridge out to a 10Gb Ethernet network for client access.)
  1 Cicso 1GbE switch for management
• Sparc Super Cluster (SSC)
  Up to 4*T4-4 compute nodes
  Same ZFS storage capability as the Exalogic machine
  Infiniband networking
  Up to 6 Exadata storage cells