Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Security compliance is becoming vital in an age where audits and industry regulations are governing the actions
that companies have to take to secure their systems. It is very difficult to achieve compliance across your application
and database portfolio in an environment where database servers and databases are custom built.
Enter the ODA
Oracle developed the Oracle Database Appliance, or ODA, to develop a solution to the business challenges mentioned
in the preceding section. If the ODAs have an overarching theme, it is “Infrastructure Deployment for Dummies.”
While some people may be taken back by this term, it is actually meant as a testament to the simplicity and elegance
of ODA deployments. The other ODA themes include the time and ease of deployment using a one-button process,
the ease of RAC deployments, and the ease of management. After viewing the ODA setup poster, you know that Oracle
is delivering a new way of doing business.
The current X3-2 ODA model is an engineered system. An engineered system is hardware and software designed
to operate together as a single, integrated packaged solution. While a company can build its own commodity
hardware solution, very few have the ability to build their own engineered systems. Most companies simply don't
have the resources, or business benefits, to build their own engineered systems, let alone a system that is optimized
for highly available Oracle databases.
The X3-2 ODA comes prepackaged with two servers with a total of 32 -2.9Gz Intel E5-2690 CPU cores. An ODA
comes with a storage cell that contains 20 900G data drives totaling 18T of raw storage, which can be expanded by
adding a second storage expansion rack with an additional 18T of raw storage, for a total of 36T of raw storage. ODAs
are deployed with either double or triple mirroring (configurable at installation time), bringing the usable storage
to approximately 6T with triple mirroring, or 9T with double mirroring, on a single storage cell. The ODA Getting
Started Guide should be consulted for the exact sizing of the mirrored storage options and disk groups, based on the
deployment options selected. The current X3-2 servers come with 256G of memory each. Four SSD drives with a total
of 800G of storage are included for the online redo logs.
■
oDa capacity is certain to change with every generation of the underlying oracle server hardware product line.
almost as soon as a hardware model is released, oracle starts development of the next generation replacement.
Note
The first generation of the ODA was a fixed, self-contained appliance unit. For the X3-2 second-generation
model, the server and storage units were modularized for the product line to take advantage of an Oracle product
roadmap for releasing new hardware to follow the Intel product line developments.
ODAs offer an engineered system from a single supplier, with a single-issue escalation point. The management
of the appliance is mainly self-contained and is integrated with Oracle's comprehensive Oracle Enterprise Manager
(OEM) management and monitoring solution.
ODAs have been purchased and deployed by a large customer base, consisting of companies of every size.
A number of Fortune 500 companies have reported that the majority of their databases can be deployed on ODAs
from a resource sizing standpoint. Models with more capacity and higher performance can be expected in the future.
Virtualization is also available on ODAs to support the rapid deployment of databases and applications using
Oracle Virtual Manager (OVM) templates. A template for WebLogic has been released, and Oracle has announced the
availability of additional templates.
ODAs will maintain their place within the Oracle engineered system product lineup for the foreseeable
future. In August 2013, Oracle expanded its engineered system product lineup to include a new offering called the
Oracle Virtualized Compute Appliance, or OVCA. This system offers a generalized Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM)
provisioning solution, whereas ODAs offer a lower-cost entry point and the virtualization has been optimized for
running databases.
