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Oracle Announces new Exalogic Model X3-2 at OOW2012

Published on: 04 October 2012 Author: Jos Nijhoff Category: Oracle

As specialized Exalogic partners we’ve heard some whispers beforehand, and now it’s official : the Exalogic X3-2 is here! Oracle made the announcement at Oracle Open World 2012 this week.

This next generation Exalogic model sports octacore Xeon processors (Sandy Bridge architecture) and 256 Gb RAM per compute node. In addition, the internal boot disks are now 200 Gb SSD’s. So with 30 nodes in a full rack it’s going from 360 to 480 Xeon cores and from 2880 Gb to a whopping 7680 Gb of RAM! Especially the impressive RAM increase will greatly help with achieving even higher deployment densities when using the new virtualized Exalogic 2.0 IaaS stack (currently at v2.0.1.1.0).

There’s no news on the capacity of the embedded ZFS 7320 storage appliance, so I assume it will have 60 Tb raw storage as before. No surprise, as the storage capacity had already been upgraded for the X2-2 model (up from 40 Tb raw, 18 Tb effective) and would seem more than adequate to me.

What is also new, and much more revolutionary for us as Exalogic specialized partners and you as a customer, is the “Trusted Partitions licensing model” that “allows for flexible licensing of Oracle software” when deploying “Oracle on Oracle” using the new virtualization platform on the Exalogic. This unique licensing model is only available on Oracle’s engineered systems.

Summarizing

X2-2 has 2 x 6 =12, X3-2 now has 2 x 8 = 16 Xeon cores (per node).

X2-2 has 96 Gb, X3-2 now has 256 Gb of RAM (per node)

X2-2 has 32 Gb, X3-2 now has 200 Gb of SSD (per node)

X2-2 has 40 Tb raw storage, upped to 60 Tb this spring, X3-2 also has 60 Tb.

Conclusion

Apart from the greater capacity in terms of computing resources, the X3-2 will run the same software stack as the X2-2, so they will be 100% compatible. All in all a natural evolution of the concept, and the RAM and SSD boost is terrific. The Trusted Partioning licensing solves many issues on licensing when going virtual, and it allows you to pay for what you actually use.

More on Trusted Partions licensing in a future blogpost!

[update]

P.S. There’s also a rather curious line in the press release : “Oracle Exalogic X3-2 incorporates Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0, and comes with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c management system right inside the box, for “single pane of glass” management, from application to disk.” Now, we all know by now that the Exalogic Control vIaaS application is built on OpsCenter 12c and that it runs in a vServer on “the box”, but the “application to disk” monniker points to EM Cloud Control 12c in my book.

Does this mean we’ll soon see Cloud Control up there in a vServer as well ? Let me know your thoughts on this… (reply below or drop me a mail : jnijhoff@qualogy.com)

Publicatiedatum: 4 oktober 2012

About the author Jos Nijhoff

Jos Nijhoff is an experienced Application Infrastructure consultant at Qualogy. Currently he plays a key role as technical presales and hands-on implementation lead for Qualogy's exclusive Exalogic partnership with Oracle for the Benelux area. Thus he keeps in close contact with Oracle presales and partner services on new developments, but maintains an independent view. He gives technical guidance and designs, reviews, manages and updates the application infrastructure before, during and after the rollout of new and existing Oracle (Fusion) Applications & Fusion Middleware implementations. Jos is also familiar with subjects like high availability, disaster recovery scenarios, virtualization, performance analysis, data security, and identity management integration with respect to Oracle applications.