1.1 What is Oracle Exadata Exascale?

Oracle Exadata Exascale further empowers Exadata to meet the most demanding corporate and cloud computing requirements by decoupling Oracle Database and Oracle Grid Infrastructure clusters from the underlying Exadata storage servers. Exascale software services can manage a large fleet of Exadata storage servers connected by the Exadata RDMA Network Fabric, providing storage services to multiple Oracle Grid Infrastructure clusters and databases while enabling:

  • Secure sharing of storage resources with strict data isolation, allowing different users and databases to share a large pool of storage while ensuring that data is inaccessible to users without the appropriate privileges

  • Flexible and dynamic storage provisioning for many users and databases

  • Increased storage utilization and efficiency while reducing storage costs

  • Sharing of otherwise idle storage processing resources to improve performance

Furthermore, Exascale introduces advanced snapshot and cloning capabilities that are tightly integrated with Oracle Database. For example, Oracle Database provides native snapshot and cloning functionality for pluggable databases (PDBs) through the CREATE PLUGGABLE DATABASE and ALTER PLUGGABLE DATABASE SQL commands. When Oracle Database utilizes Exascale storage, the pluggable database snapshot and snapshot copy (cloning) functions automatically use native Exascale snapshots and clones, which are space-efficient file copies based directly on the underlying Oracle Database files, thereby eliminating the need for a test master database to support snapshots and clones on Exadata.

In addition to unparalleled support for Oracle Database, Exascale provides block storage services, which deliver sophisticated capabilities to create and manage arbitrary-sized raw block volumes based on Exascale storage.

While end users can create and use Exascale block volumes for numerous applications, Exadata also leverages Exascale block volumes internally to store Exadata database server virtual machine images. Placing virtual machine images in Exascale removes the dependency on local storage inside the Exadata compute nodes, which enables the creation of more virtual machines and provides the infrastructure to support seamless migration of virtual machines between different Exadata compute nodes.

Despite the fact that Exascale transforms Exadata storage, Exascale also preserves the proven strengths and benefits of Exadata:

  • Scalability - including efficient support for hundreds of Exadata storage servers in an Exascale cluster

  • High availability - based on a clustered architecture with built-in redundancy and dynamic fail-over of software services

  • High performance - utilizing Exadata RDMA memory and Exadata Smart Flash Cache

  • Reliability - using proven Exadata storage server technologies

  • Security - employing advanced security protocols and automatic encryption

Exascale runs on 2-socket Oracle Exadata system hardware with RoCE Network Fabric (X8M-2 or later). For full-featured native Oracle Database file storage in Exascale, you must use Oracle Database 23ai release 23.5.0 or later. You can also employ Exascale block volumes to support databases using older Oracle Database software releases back to Oracle Database 19c.