What does Oracle Exadata X11M offer the enterprise?

Oracle recently launched its Exadata X11M product. Exadata is an integrated hardware and software platform built from the ground up to optimize Oracle Database workloads. Exadata X11M zeroes in on several areas – performance in AI, OLTP and analytics, scale, operational efficiency and cost. Further, Oracle simultaneously announced X11M innovations for public cloud, multicloud, hybrid and on-premises deployments.

While these are some great articles, it’s worth digging into what Oracle did and didn’t deliver with this Database Engine.

Oracle, Enterprise Data And The Database Machine

Oracle’s large footprint in the enterprise means it likely handles more enterprise data than any other technology vendor. These are data that drive organizations – the very definition of mission and business is critical. Because of these dynamics, Oracle introduced Exadata in 2008. Exadata was designed to provide an integrated platform tightly tuned for performance, scale and reliability for in-database analytics. Over its thirteen generations of development, Exadata has been enhanced to deliver these capabilities across the spectrum of Oracle database workloads: AI, analytics, transaction processing, document databases, graph databases, space, time series and more.

Exadata is a tightly integrated hardware and software platform – truly a database machine. It is designed from the ground up for performance, scale and reliability. For example, Exadata RDMA memory, also called XRMEM, is a shared read accelerator that uses direct remote memory access to provide extremely fast access to data stored on storage servers. XRMEM is a prime example of how Oracle has created a custom architecture to drive differentiated performance.

Oracle has built many such innovations into the Exadata platform since its inception. Further, while Oracle Database will run on almost any server platform, its performance on Exadata is significantly better, and running workloads faster means they can be run using fewer hardware and core licenses. data – further increasing efficiency. Examples of Exadata optimizations that help run core workloads faster include Exadata Smart Scan, which offloads SQL queries to smart storage, and AI Smart Scan, which does the same for AI vector search.

Exadata X11M redesigned from the ground up

While Exadata has evolved over the years, Exadata X11M may be the most significant update since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and replaced HP as its server platform. As I mentioned earlier, the X11M is all about delivering the best performance, operational efficiency and cost. It achieves this through a refreshed hardware platform anchored by dual-socket AMD EPYC servers (with up to 96 cores per CPU) and improved system software. Oracle uses these servers together with fast DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen5 flash memory to create high-performance database servers and intelligent storage servers that make Exadata’s unique capabilities possible.

By combining Oracle’s XRMEM with these EPYC capabilities, X11M storage servers realize a performance increase of up to 33% compared to X10M and can scan data stored in flash memory 2.2 times faster than before – enabling more value to be delivered from data much faster. Oracle also claims that vector AI searches on database servers (in memory) can reach results 43% faster than on the X10M. For vector searches run on storage servers (in Flash), the performance increase is 55%.

Further, when looking at how the Exadata software uses the hardware, Oracle claims even more incredible results. For customers running generative AI on larger (private) datasets, more complex vector searches can be performed significantly faster due to improvements in storage server data filtering (4.7x increase) and binary vector searches (up to 32x increase).

All of this adds up to Exadata X11M delivering real-world value to organizations operationalizing AI with their enterprise data. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much the X11M delivers in terms of realized (real-world) gains in performance and cost – which will inevitably be slightly different from the benchmark improvements cited above – but it’s clearly these gains are significant. And with no price change from the previous generation, the inherent business value is only more compelling.

Performance matters – And not just with AI

While AI is the topic every IT expert loves to discuss, there are other workloads driving businesses today. One of these is online transaction processing, and this is another area where Oracle has delivered significant improvements with Exadata X11M. Effective OLTP processing is all about low latency, high throughput, and concurrency – in other words, how many transactions can be performed per second. This requires a database with super-efficient indexing capabilities coupled with optimized queries and supported by an infrastructure that can handle extreme concurrency.

However, when performing OLTP at scale, the architectural designs of a server-resident database go out the window because of this extreme concurrency. Because of this, Oracle has spent a lot of time working on software implementations that can take full advantage of the underlying infrastructure.

The result of Oracle’s work on fully utilizing the X11M hardware means more transactions on fewer servers. For example, the Exadata X11M can handle 25% more concurrent or serial transactions faster than its predecessor. While Oracle did not disclose the configurations in its test scenarios, I suspect this is happening on fewer servers due to the high core count on AMD’s EPYC processors.

For customers with an older version of Exadata deployed, consider this: Exadata X11M delivers 4x faster concurrent transaction throughput and 62% faster serial transaction processing than Exadata X7.

The company also claims significant performance gains in analytics, with up to 25% faster query processing than the X10M. This is again achieved not only by hardware or software, but by tight integration between the two. In this case, Exadata uses some unique capabilities to offload tasks (Smart Scan) and accelerate database I/O (Smart Flash Cache and Storage Indexes) for better results.

As with OLTP, what is designed on paper to support analytics does not always translate to real-world performance as complexity and scale are introduced. This is where the value of an integrated data stack like X11M can deliver value where database platforms bundled together using commodity hardware simply cannot.

Autonomy drives innovation

While numbers and performance claims usually (and rightfully so) steal the show at any product launch, I tend to look more at any related impact on enterprise IT. The technology — generative AI, for example — is amazing and can theoretically deliver enormous value to an organization. However, if an enterprise IT organization struggles to deploy, tune and manage that technology, the impact backfires on many levels. Worse, failed POCs linked to a lack of IT skills can cause business leaders to grumble about the technology’s operationalization.

Oracle seems to really understand this and, as a company, has invested heavily in abstracting complex and mundane tasks away from IT workers through automation. With Exadata running the database autonomously, database administrators and their teams spend far less time tuning and managing environments and more time delivering business value. Whether on premise or in the cloud (or multiple clouds), Oracle has set a pace for self-driving, self-tuning, self-management and self-healing that the rest of the market is following. As a former IT executive who had to deal with the budget line items associated with doing all these tasks manually, I can tell you this is a breath of fresh air.

It is difficult to quantify how much maintaining and managing complex systems is a barrier to innovation in an IT organization. It’s not just the hours spent on a weekly basis. It’s the blinders that are put on the staff, along with the inability to see anything beyond the next trouble ticket. This is a tricky issue that bogs down many enterprise IT organizations. Because of this, I believe that what Oracle has done with Exadata, the Exadata Cloud, and the Autonomous Database is worthy of far greater recognition than it receives.

Exadata in the cloud – And many clouds

Oracle has spent a lot of time and energy pushing native multicloud support for Exadata. This means that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (and the Exadata platform) is physically located not only in OCI data centers, but also in the data centers of every major cloud service provider. Most importantly, this means that customers’ applications and data can be natively and securely integrated with their cloud instances.

This bears repeating: for Oracle customers using other CSPs, OCI and the Exadata platform reside physically in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud data centers. They are consumed as a native service of each CSP and reside on that CSP’s network, integrated with other cloud services.

This is a smart strategy on Oracle’s part – one I’ve written about extensively over the past couple of years (for example here, here and here). I’m a big fan of what Oracle is doing with this for many reasons, but let me dig into a couple. First and foremost, Oracle meets customers where they are. The company is smart enough to understand that not all Oracle Database customers will run their workloads in OCI data centers. Because of this, Oracle has placed a premium on the Oracle database residing where the client applications and services are deployed.

Second, the company is forcing the cloud market to fundamentally change from a set of stove-top CSP environments to one where applications and data can move quickly, securely, and independently from CSP “A” to CSP “B” without fear of exploitation – and without crazy exit fees. It’s still early in the game, but I see Oracle making moves that will benefit every enterprise IT organization, whether they’re Oracle customers or not.

Enterprise Impact

Sometimes it is difficult to precisely determine the value and impact of technology in an organization. I’ve never been a fan of studies and tests that show such precise amounts of value provided. Value is too subjective and each customer is too unique to take any claim as gospel.

However, Oracle Exadata X11M is delivering huge improvements from an order-of-magnitude perspective. Further, it is doing so without a cost increase compared to previous generation cloud and on-premises systems. Because of this, I think any existing Exadata customer would be wise to take a look at X11M and what it can offer in terms of operationalizing AI and improving core business capabilities, and any Oracle Database customer who not currently using Exadata should take a deep look at that as well.