Oracle and Hardware Architecture - Oracle Essentials - page 317

such disks in combination with higher capacity but lower performing (and cheaper)
disks for less frequently accessed data. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) in the
Oracle database, particularly the ILM Assistant (first made available in 2007), provides
the capability to manage such an environment.
Oracle's Engineered Systems
Oracle refers to proper configurations—those that feature proper I/O (especially spin‐
dles that provide access paths to storage), memory, and CPUs—as balanced configura‐
tions . IT organizations found working with multiple hardware vendors in order to get
proper storage configurations difficult. This led Oracle to develop reference configu‐
rations with several key hardware platform and storage vendors to help provide more
accurate initial sizing.
However, many IT organizations still found integration of the components to be time-
consuming, and such configurations often became unbalanced over time as server and
storage modifications were made. As complexity grew, organizations also found the
time to debug problems increasing partly due to multiple platform vendors being in‐
volved. Oracle came to realize the need to create and support engineered systems with
predefined configurations and upgrade paths. The first such system introduced was the
Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Today, Oracle offers a family of engineered systems
that can be deployed as individual solutions or in combination. Our focus in this chapter
is on engineered systems designed for the Oracle database.
All of the systems share some common traits. All are built from Oracle Sun servers that
feature redundant power supplies and multiple interconnect and network connections.
They feature GbE and 10 GbE ports providing connectivity to user networks. All of the
Sun servers also feature Integrated Lights-Out Management ports that can send Auto‐
matic Service Requests to Oracle Support when components fail or are about to fail.
The systems rely on RAC providing high availability for nodes and mirroring for high
availability storage. All are managed using Oracle Enterprise Manager, including the
hardware management extensions provided by Sun Operations Center components.
We'll next explore some of the unique characteristics of each system.
Oracle Exadata Database Machine
As this edition of Oracle Essentials was published, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine
was far and away the most popular Oracle-engineered system to deploy Oracle databases
on. Initially introduced for data warehousing, Exadata is also widely used in hosting
online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, and mixed workload databases, and
as a consolidation platform where multiple OLTP and data warehousing databases are
deployed. The systems are designed to run the Oracle Database 11 g Enterprise Edition
or more current releases. (The releases that are supported are dependent on Oracle