Database Reference
In-Depth Information
From a hardware perspective, you get a lot of resources when you purchase an ODA. For the current X3-2 model,
this includes two servers with 256G memory each, with a total of 32 cores, and a lot of storage. The current storage
volume is 18T of raw disk, which can be deployed as approximately 9T usable double mirrored, or 6T usable triple
mirrored. The storage can be doubled again to 36T of raw storage with a storage expansion rack. The ODA Getting
Started manual details the exact amount of usable storage, depending on the deployment options that are selected.
However, the secret sauce of the ODA is not the hardware. The secret sauce of an ODA is the software. The
ingredients include RAC deployments in hours, the automated patching of all tiers (BIOS, firmware, OS, ILOM, grid,
database) resulting in systems that are kept up-to-date, stable, and compliant. The ODA hardware—with the standard,
embedded Oracle hardware support facilities and accompanied by a lot of value-added management software—offers
a great value proposition. Benefits include the following:
•
ODAs come with an embedded validation toolkit (
oakcli
—Oracle appliance kit command-
line interface).
oakcli
contains a full set of diagnostic and management utilities to maintain
the “keep it simple” management theme of ODAs.
•
An ODA allows you to cap the licensing and resources that are deployed on the hardware in
a “pay as you grow model” vs. paying for all of the capacity and licensing up front. Additional
capacity is enabled through applying a key.
•
The prepackaged software and deployment model provides the ability to deploy a
standardized database platform across your database portfolio. ODAs are a solution to the
traditional model of building servers and databases by hand, resulting in a data center full of
“totem poles,” where no two totem poles look the same.
There is no question that the ODA standardized deployment model lowers management and administration
costs. This is in part due to the reduced number of build steps and the reduction in the number of people and teams
that need to become involved, as well as reducing all of the handoffs between teams. After an ODA is deployed, the
unified nature of the system and platform-specific automations lower ongoing administration costs. The ongoing
administrative savings come from the combination of reducing the number of teams needed to support an ODA, the
platform's stability, automated patching of all of the appliance components, a lower number of moving parts, server
and component redundancy, appliance kit automation, and the embedded support facilities, including ASR and
the ILOM.
The rapid setup and standardized model is an excellent building block for DBaaS or cloud services. The process
to create new single instance, RAC One and RAC databases on an ODA has been reduced to 15 minutes. ODAs are
engineered systems that can be deployed by companies of any size. ODAs often serve as low-cost lower-life cycle
environments for Exadata, as well as an entry point and starting success story for companies that want to invest in
Exadata in the long term.
Oracle is investing in the platform. New functionality is released every quarter, and the software changes are
backward compatible to previous hardware generations. ODAs started as a small to midsized company solution,
but then big companies started buying them. This helped to drive more momentum for the ODA product. Since
ODAs are a single vendor product, intervendor handoffs are eliminated, and the testing of all components as a unit
is self-contained within Oracle. From a troubleshooting standpoint, customers only have one vendor that needs to
be contacted for all support issues. When a support call is initiated, it is handled by a specialized engineered system
support team.
The ability to deploy infrastructure quickly, or pre-deploy infrastructure, has overall savings by getting projects
launched quickly to achieve business benefits. ODAs come with sufficient resources to serve as a consolidation
platform and support your internal shared services initiatives. ODAs also support the standard Oracle resource
management facilities, such as instance caging and database resource management to support consolidation efforts.
In the end, companies need to decide how much work and overhead they want to take on by developing their
own solution vs. buying a prepackaged solution like the ODA. A key benefit of the ODA is that it lets companies spend
their time on core business functions instead of routine support tasks.
