What is Oracle Exadata ???

Oracle recently announced a wide array of products and solutions spanning database, middleware, applications and hardware in the Indian market. Among all these products and solution - Exadata, drew our attention.

According to the company, Oracle "Exadata Database Machine" provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. A complete package of servers, storage, networking, and software, the product is scalable, secure, and redundant.

Till now more than 1000 Exadata machines have been installed in 67 countries and across 23 industries. With more than 60 per cent market share, the company aims to leverage its existing customer base, which consists of more than 7000 Indian organizations to drive sales for Exadata.

Currently, Sun Pharmaceuticals, Tech Mahindra, Religare, Reliance Consumer Finance and Stock Holding Corporation and Stock Holding Corporation of India have adopted Exadata for their datawarhousing , database and OLTP requirement.

Placed among the top five vendors worldwide, Oracle believes that Exadata has made a strong contribution to Oracle’s growth in Q4 FY10, IT PRO India explores the product with Sheshagiri Anegondi, Vice President – Technology, Oracle India.

Bringing in technical innovation

"Exadata brings forward key technical innovations like Intelligent Storage, Smart Flash Cache and Hybrid Columnar Compression. With these innovations, Exadata provides extreme performance while ensuring maximum ROI," says Sheshagiri Anegondi, Vice President – Technology, Oracle India.

He further adds, "the smart storage software in Exadata offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g servers to Exadata’s storage layer for parallel data processing. Because there’s less data moving through the higher-bandwidth connections, you get dramatically improved performance as well as concurrency for simple and complex data warehousing queries.”

Exadata packs in some impressive features. It performs 1.5 million I/O operations in 1 second, speeding database performance by 10x. It also reduces electricity consumption by 87.5 percent and floor space by 75 percent – thereby shrinking datacenter from an entire building to a single room.

Playing pivotal role in security issues

Exadata will also play a pivotal role in data security. "As organizations consolidate their data, more and more sensitive information ranging from email addresses to credit card numbers now resides in a single database, giving organizations the ability to secure and monitor that data more efficiently than ever before," according to Anegondi.

As a matter of fact Exadata, can utilize Oracle’s industry leading database security solutions to block threats and detect unauthorized activities like misuse of privileged user credentials, insider threats, and SQL injection.

For further security Oracle is offering Oracle's Advanced Security for Exadata. This would include Oracle Database Vault that protects against misuse of stolen login credentials, application bypass, and unauthorized changes to applications, including attempts to make copies of application tables, Oracle Audit Vault that provides auditors and internal security personnel an efficient means of reviewing of activity inside the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Database Firewall to monitor in-bound SQL traffic over Oracle SQL Net and the TCP/IP protocol."