Rejecting Intel, Oracle Pumps Up Exadata Beef Cake With AMD Protein

Oracle is promising a significant transaction throughput and analytics performance boost with Exadata X10M, the first upgrade to its hardware-engineered database system.

The integrated hardware and software platform has eschewed the 2.6GHz Intel 2x32-core Intel Xeon 8358 processors which powered its Exadata X9M machine for 4th Gen AMD Epyc processors.

Storage servers can now hold 22 percent more data, while all-flash storage servers offer 2.4x the capacity of the previous systems, the vendor claimed.

Database servers support 50 percent higher memory capacity than the earlier iteration, enabling more databases to run on the same system, while starting at the same price as the previous generation, Big Red said.

Oracle has built on the heritage of tightly integrated hardware and software it acquired with Sun Microsystems back in 2009 in a move few in the large-scale database market can now follow, according to Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

• AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Computing
• Suit alleges Oracle oversold and under-delivered on NetSuite software
• AMD's latest Epycs are bristling with cores, stacked to the gills with cache
• Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

"They are all gone. It used to be Sun – before Oracle – and HPE. There is nothing at Dell/EMC to compare. Basically, Oracle was able to build the better hardware for its own software and not surprisingly, that keeps all the competition not interested," he said.

Exadata X10M is available in Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Mueller pointed out, though, that Exadata could be provisioned via Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform.

"Practically, it is the most performant database architecture out there, with the upside that it can be fully managed by Oracle – which is an attractive prospect. With being able to provision Oracle from Azure it is easier to get the Oracle database. Microsoft made the colocation deal, which is an implicit acknowledgement that SQL Server is not scaling like Oracle," he said.

Online payments giant PayPal is an Exadata user. Director of transaction processing and data services Akash Guha said it had decided to modernize its IT infrastructure with Oracle Exadata X10M.

"We expect to seamlessly handle the immense demands of our operations, delivering outstanding performance, and exceeding the needs of our valued customers. We have trust in our exciting new relationship with Oracle to deliver exceptional results and drive continuous improvement," he said in a statement. ®