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.

Announcing my Openworld 2013 presentation material

Last Tuesday I had the privilege to present at Oracle Openworld 2013 together with Sam Marraccini (the guy with the big smile here in the pic) from EMC’s Flash products division. Sam introduced the various EMC Flash offerings we have, and I discussed some experiences and best practices from the field. We really got lots of interaction with the audience, and many questions (at one point I was looking at about 5 hands raised simultaneously) which caused me to run out of time finishing some of the best practices I planned to discuss at the end. But interaction is always better than just us talking so I got the feeling the session was successful – although I’d like to hear from people in the audience what their thoughts are (feel free to comment!)

When people started to make snapshots of the slides with their iPhones, we promised the audience to make the slides available ASAP. So here they are. They will probably also be available via Oracle’s OOW pages within time.