Time for a change: Migrating Exadata to a modern All-Flash array

 

With Oracle’s uncertain SPARC future, the rise of very fast and capable All-Flash arrays and existing Exadata customers looking to refresh their hardware, I increasingly get questions on what platform we can offer as an alternative to Exadata or Supercluster. A big challenge can be to break away from the lock-in effect of HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression although I’d like to call it Hotel California Compression) as it seems hard to get an estimate on how much storage capacity is needed in other storage or migrating to other platforms. Note that any storage could theoretically use HCC but Oracle disabled it on purpose on anything other than Exadata, ZFS appliance or Pillar (huh?) storage.

As far as I know, there is no direct query to figure out how big a HCC compressed table would get after decompressing. HCC tables can get very large and the compression ratio can be fairly high which makes sizing a new environment a challenge.

So in order to provide a reasonable guesstimate, I created a typical scenario on my VMware homelab to estimate generic storage requirements for HCC compressed environments.

Looking back and forward

I have been enjoying a short holiday in which I decided to totally disconnect from work for a while and re-charge my battery. So while many bloggers and authors in our industry were making predictions for 2013, I was doing some other stuff and blogging was not part of that ;-)

Now that we survived the end of times let’s look back and forward a bit. I don’t want to burn myself making crazy predictions about this year but still like to present some thoughts for the longer term. Stay tuned…