1.1 What is Oracle Exadata Exascale?

Before Exascale, Exadata administrators were required to allocate dedicated storage resources for every Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) cluster. Furthermore, administrators had to decide how much storage to dedicate to data files and how much to apportion for recovery files. Once set, these allocations were not easily changeable. Consequently, multiple GI clusters and databases could not share storage easily and dynamically, resulting in fragmentation and under-utilization of storage resources.

Oracle Exadata Exascale further empowers Exadata to meet the most demanding corporate and cloud computing requirements by decoupling Oracle Database and GI 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 GI 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 and eliminate the requirement for a test master database to support snapshots and clones on Exadata. 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 uses Exascale storage, the PDB 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.

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 (VM) images. Placing VM images in Exascale removes the dependency on local storage inside the Exadata compute nodes, which enables the creation of more VMs and provides the infrastructure to support seamless VM migration 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