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Oracle Exalogic

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Exalogic is a computer appliance made by Oracle Corporation, commercially available since 2010.[1] It is a cluster of x86-64-servers running Oracle Linux with Fusion Middleware preinstalled.

Its full trade mark is Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 (derived from the SI prefix exa- and -logic, probably from Weblogic), positioned by the vendor as a preconfigured clustered application server to use in building blocks in clouds with elastic computing abilities.[2]

History

Exalogic was announced at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in September, 2010, as a continuation to the Oracle appliance product line, started in 2008 with Exadata (preconfigured database cluster).[1][2]

In December, 2010, Oracle announced a new version of Exalogic powered by 16-core nodes of SPARC T3 processors with the Solaris running, instead of the Intel Xeon hosts with Oracle Enterprise Linux used in X2-2 version.[3] As end of 2011, SPARC version still commercially unavailable.

Form

Exalogic is a factory assembled 19-inch rack of 42 units, completed with servers and network equipment. There are 4 configurations, at different prices, depending on what fills the rack (the following price list is for U.S. consumers)[4]:

  • eight rack — $325,000;
  • quarter rack — $475,000;
  • half-rack — $675,000;
  • full rack — $1,075,000.

The weight of the full rack is about 1 ton (more than 2000 lbs), a quarter rack weighs half as much.[5]

Hardware

The hardware component of the appliance consists of: a group of 1-unit Intel Xeon servers, each of equipped with two six-core 2.93 GHz processors and two solid-state drives for operating system and swap space; a common storage area network; and a set of InfiniBand and Ethernet switches[6] A full rack contains 30 server nodes, a half rack, 16, and a quarter rack, 8. Each server node has installed 96 GB of RAM, 4 10 Gbit Ethernet cards, and a double Infiniband port. The storage area network for all configurations is similar, with 40 TB of raw space. The vendor's specifications and advertising content usually indicate the total parameters (360 processor kernels and 2.9 TB RAM for full rack).[5]

Software

Customers have a choice of two 64-bit operating systems to run on the server nodes of the appliance: Oracle Enterprise Linux version 5.5 or Solaris release 11 express.[6] All servers have an installed cluster configuration of Oracle WebLogic Server and distributed memory cache Oracle Coherence. To run Java applications on a machine there is a choice of HotSpot or JRockit. Management of the appliance is available in the Oracle Enterprise Manager toolset, which is also pre-installed in the appliance. A transaction monitor Tuxedo[7] is optionally supplied.

Customers

Exalogic is deployed by the University of Melbourne, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, Amway, the Hyundai Motor Group, Bank of Chile, Haier, and Deutsche Post DHL.[8] [9]

Criticism

Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, presumes that any appliance principally lacks scalability for the end-user compared with the infrastructure, supplied as service, and notes that the Exalogic approach is actually a rollback to the obsolete mainframe concept.[10] Also, commentators have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of placing the word "elastic" in the name,[11] because, despite the ability to load balance, there are obvious computing limits of the box, and those limits cannot be transcended like they should be in a true elastic environment; the same criticism applies to all solutions designed for private cloud computing, in particular, it applies to EMC and Hewlett-Packard products.[11]

References

  1. ^ a b Clarke, Gavin (2010-09-20). "HP and Oracle avoid blows over disgraced Hurd". The Register. Retrieved 2011-05-29.
  2. ^ a b Nairn, Geoff (2010-09-27). "Big Data, Big Blue and Going Green". L.Tooltip Carl Linnaeus: Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. b7e4143e-c821-11df-ae3a-00144feab49a. Retrieved 2011-05-29. More surprising was to hear the software giant announce a piece of hardware, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. As its name suggests, it is Oracle's attempt to steal the cloud computing spotlight. It comprises a mix of Oracle software and high-performance hardware and is aimed at enterprises that want to build their own "private cloud" using their own hardware. Sounds suspiciously like mainframe computer.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  3. ^ Burt, Jeffery (2010-12-02). "Oracle Unveils New SPARC Supercluster, Exalogic Offerings". EWeek. Retrieved 2011-05-29. Oracle also will announce a new Exalogic cloud computing system that is powered by SPARC chips and runs Solaris … This new Exalogic solution will complement that through the use of SPARC T3 chips and also running Solaris {{cite web}}: Check |authorlink= value (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |description= and |deadurl= (help); External link in |authorlink= (help)
  4. ^ "Oracle Engineered Systems Price List" (PDF). Oracle price lists. Oracle. 2012-01-10. Retrieved 2012-01-14. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |deadlink= (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help)
  5. ^ a b "Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2" (2011-03-15). Data Sheet. Oracle. PDF. Retrieved 2011-05-29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |description= (help)
  6. ^ a b Frazier, Mitch (2010-09-20). "The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud". Linux Journal. Retrieved 2011-05-29. Each 1U "node" in an Exalogic rack consists of two Xeon chips. Each Xeon chip is a 6-core processor running at 2.93 GHz. Each node has redundant InfiniBand connections. Each node also contains two solid-state disks (SSD) for the operating system and for local swap space. An full rack would contain 360 CPU Cores, 2.8 TB (TeraBytes, 1 TB = 1024 GB ) of RAM, 960 GB of SSD, and 40 TB of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disk. Sorry though, there's no video card so you can't use this for your desktop.
  7. ^ "Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software Data Sheet" (PDF). Oracle Data Sheet. Oracle. 2011-03-25. Retrieved 2011-05-29. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |description= and |deadurl= (help)
  8. ^ Are Oracle's Exadata racks fluffing Apple's iCloud?
  9. ^ OpenWorld Recap Day 1: Innovations in Oracle Fusion Middleware, Exalogic, Cloud Application Foundation
  10. ^ Clarke, Gavin (2010-12-07). "Salesforce's Benioff: 'Ellison flunks vision test'. Oracle dreams of a mainframe past". The Register. Retrieved 2011-05-31. "The cloud is not in a box — you don’t have to add more boxes to get scalability, " Benioff said
  11. ^ a b Williams, Alex (2010-09-30). "Why the Oracle Exalogic Cloud is Not Elastic". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved 2011-05-31.«Placing the term "Elastic" in the name of this offering is stretching the accepted definition of the term as it relates to cloud computing … You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased…» … «EMC and HP are both making solutions that fit this description … use case ends, those resources are then returned to the common pool to be redeployed, just as they would be in a larger cloud infrastructure»
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