Oracle Exadata Integration and cloud computing applications (i)

1. Exadata

1.1 Oracle Cloud Computing Introduction

 As cloud infrastructure matures, more and more companies are beginning to focus on the implementation of cloud computing, accelerating the deployment of cloud computing solutions, and migrating their IT applications and data resources to cloud environments. For the "cloud" of potential users, they are most concerned about how the "cloud" will be landed, a software and hardware resources in one solution is a key factor in the landing of cloud computing.

Oracle can now provide users with a full range of SaaS-to-IaaS solutions. Oracle's product line has been extended to a complete chain from application to storage, disk, and chip. Oracle has been emphasizing openness, and they are adept at using an open product portfolio that combines the best ideas and the best hardware to provide an easy-to-use, high-performance, platform-based product. Exadata Database Cloud server products, it is a hardware and software based on a reasonable configuration together, software and hardware integration of a representative product, hardware and software can be in an optimized way to operate in a coordinated manner, and in a pre-integrated work state to provide customers, By reducing the total amount of hardware and reducing the complexity of the environment, you can effectively help your enterprise achieve efficient, low-cost, fast and flexible cloud applications.

The Exadata Database cloud Server can work independently or with Oracle Middleware Cloud Server (Oracle Exalogic). The middleware cloud server provides an optimal level of operation for running Oracle converged Middleware and Oracle converged management software. The combination of a database cloud server and a middleware cloud server is a fully integrated hardware and software solution designed to deliver high performance for all enterprise applications, including Oracle e-business Suite, Siebel, and PeopleSoft management software.

1.2 Oracle Exadata

The Oracle Exadata Database cloud Server (referred to as Exadata) incorporates an integrated design designed to be the Oracle database operating platform that delivers the highest performance and availability. With Sun's industry-standard hardware and Oracle's intelligent database and storage software, the Exadata appliance delivers superior performance for all database load types, including online transaction processing (OLTP), Data warehousing (DW), and hybrid load consolidation. The Exadata all-in-one implementation is simple and fast, capable of handling the largest and most important database applications, and typically allows these applications to run up to 10 times times faster or higher.

Oracle Exadata Database Cloud Server is an easy-to-deploy solution for hosting Oracle databases that provide the highest database performance to date. The database cloud server is a "cloud in a Box" system that includes a database server, an Oracle Exadata storage server, a InfiniBand architecture for storage networking, and all the other components required to host an Oracle database. The system leverages the massive parallel grid architecture of Real application Clusters and Exadata storage to provide extreme performance for all types of database applications. Database cloud servers and Exadata storage deliver performance breakthroughs, ease of use and management, and deliver mission-critical availability and reliability.

Because all Exadata database machines are configured in a consistent configuration, users can benefit from the experience of thousands of users who have deployed Exadata database machines for their mission-critical applications.  Customers ' machines are the same as those used by Oracle support to discover and solve problems and the Oracle database that Oracle engineering uses for development. Oracle Exadata runs the standard Oracle database. As a result, any application currently running on an Oracle database can be migrated seamlessly to the Exadata database machine without any changes.

1.3 Oracle Exadate features

1. The Exadata database machine is an easy-to-deploy system that contains all the hardware required to run an Oracle database. database servers, storage servers, and networks are preconfigured, tuned, and tested by Oracle experts, eliminating the need to spend weeks deploying a high-performance system as often as usual. Use extensive end-to-end testing to ensure that all components work together seamlessly to ensure that there is no performance bottleneck or single point of failure in the system that affects the entire system.
2. The database cloud server is a preconfigured system that can be deployed on the same day, saving a lot of integration effort, cost, and time during database deployment. Because it is a well-known configuration, Oracle support is very familiar with how to service the system, so the system has an excellent support experience.
3. This is a common infrastructure that can be used to deploy a database to serve all applications (whether OLTP, DW, or both) and as a consolidated platform for multiple databases, and the benefits of this common infrastructure create great opportunities to increase the efficiency of your data center. It is a truly "integrated packaged cloud service" system.
4. Extreme performance and hardware and software integration of the design, with a strong stretching, from 1/4 configuration to 8 of the combination of the group has a 32 times-fold stretching;
5. Thanks to this integration of hardware and software, Oracle Exadata and exalogic are integrated into a cloud-like box, which, because of its extremely strong processing power and software-cloud design, can carry many applications simultaneously on a single machine that can carry nearly 20 applications. Because the performance of the machine itself, much larger than the former kind of decentralized server, storage, switch some equipment, so can greatly save space.
6. can significantly reduce costs. After integration, the customer installs the maintenance personnel to be few, the physical facility energy consumption is also very few, at the same time, this is the green it, is very green.

1.4 Oracle Exadata Benefits Oracle Exadata is the only database server system in the industry that can efficiently run online transaction processing (OLTP), OLAP (such as data warehousing, and so on) and mixed workloads. Over the past more than 10 years, OLTP and OLAP have been well-known in the industry because the previous machines did not have the ability to handle both OLTP and OLAP simultaneously, one for transactional and the other for large-scale data warehousing and so on. These two are partial dynamics, one is the rapid large-scale access. Now Oracle can put all of the content in a system, for the enterprise almost all systems can be put into this device, so that customers can start in the production system to do real-time data analysis and business detection.
The inherent concept of differentiating OLTP from OLAP into two separate parts is now through the design of the Oracle Cloud box, which can be integrated on a single machine, changing the previous concept. This enables the reduction of management personnel, greatly improving customer usage. Users can do OLTP during the day, do large-scale data analysis at night, and expect instant data analysis and queries in the event of an emergency during the day.

• OLTP is online transaction processing, that is, we often say that the relational database, that is, the recording of instant increase, deletion, change, check, is what we often apply, this is the basis of the database;
  
• OLAP is the core of data warehouse, the so-called Data Warehouse is an analytic database for a large number of data which has been formed by OLTP, which is used to deal with the important decision information such as business intelligence, decision support and so on. Data Warehouse is the processing and analysis of historical data after the database is applied to some degree is a tool that handles two different uses.

2. Exadata Technology Architecture

2.1 Oracle Exadata Components let's start with a brief introduction to the database Cloud server components. The database cloud server is shipped as a rack that accommodates the various components that make up the database infrastructure: disks, servers, networked devices, and so on. There are three configuration types to choose from: Full rack (see), half rack or One-fourth rack. All of these three types are the same in terms of architecture, but the number of components is different.

Each of these components and their role (for exadata_x2-2) is described in detail below. The content listed below applies to all racks; You can also view these components in the real world with a very exciting 3D demo.
Database Node -the database cloud server runs Oracle databases 11g Real application Cluster. The cluster and database run on a server called a database node or a compute node (or "node", for short). The full rack has 8 nodes running Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris.  
Storage Unit -a disk is not connected to a database compute node like a direct-attached store, but instead connects to another server called a storage unit (or "unit", for short). Oracle Exadata Server Software runs on the operating systems in these units.
Disk -There are 10 disks per unit. Depending on the configuration, these disks can be 600GB high-performance disks, or 2TB high-capacity disks. You can select the desired disk type at the time of purchase.
Flash disks -Each unit also has about 384GB of flash disk. These disks can be supplied as memory to compute nodes (for databases) or as a level two cache (called Smart cache) for a DB cluster.
Infiniband Lines -units and nodes are connected by high-speed, low-latency Infiniband. To provide redundancy and high throughput, 3 InfiniBand switches are available. Note: The fibre switch is not used because there is no optical component.
Ethernet Switch -the outside world can communicate via InfiniBand or via Ethernet. The system provides a set of Ethernet switches with ports that are open to the outside. The client can connect to the node via Ethernet. DMA and other users can also connect to nodes and cells via Ethernet. Backups are best done through InfiniBand, but can also be done over the network.
KVM Switch -Direct physical connection to individual nodes and units via a keyboard, video, and mouse switch. This device is used when it is initially set up, and when the system network is unavailable. In a normal environment, you do not need to approach the rack to access this KVM, even when the Unit and node power is turned on and off.

2.2 Oracle Exadata Architecture is the simplification of a typical database cloud server half-rack deployment. The figure shows two Oracle databases, one is a Real application Clusters (RAC) database deployed across three database servers, and the other is a single-instance database deployed on the database server remaining in the half-rack configuration. (Of course, all four database servers can be used for a single four-node RAC cluster.) The RAC database can be used as a production database, and a single-instance database can be used for testing and deployment. These two databases share seven Exadata units in a half-rack configuration, but they can have their own independent Oracle home directories to maintain software independence. All components of this configuration-the database server, the Exadata unit, the InfiniBand switch, and other supporting hardware-are housed in a database cloud server rack.

The database cloud server uses the latest InfiniBand interconnect between the server and the storage. Each database server and Exadata unit has a dual-port, four times-fold data rate (QDR) InfiniBand connection for high availability. Each InfiniBand link provides up to a gigabyte of bandwidth-many times higher than traditional storage or server networks. In addition, Oracle's Interconnect protocol uses direct data placement methods (dma-Direct memory access) to move data directly from the line to the database buffer without additional data replication to ensure low CPU overhead. The InfiniBand network combines the flexibility of LAN networks with the efficiency of Sans. By using the InfiniBand network, Oracle ensures that the network does not become a performance bottleneck. The InfiniBand network also provides high-performance cluster interconnect for Oracle database real application Cluster (RAC) nodes.
The architecture of Oracle Database Cloud Server is designed to scale horizontally to any level of performance. To achieve higher performance and greater storage capacity, additional database servers and Exadata units can be added to the configuration-for example, half-rack upgrades to full-rack. As more Exadata units are added to the configuration, storage capacity and I/O performance are almost linearly increased. In a database cloud server configuration, cell-to-cell communication is never done or required.
the schema of the database cloud server solution includes components from the database server and components in the Exadata unit. The software architecture shown for the One-fourth rack configuration.

When using a database cloud server, a large amount of SQL processing is diverted from the database server to the Exadata unit. In addition to providing a traditional block service for a database, the database cloud server implements the ability to deliver from the DB instance to the underlying storage. One of the unique advantages of Exadata storage compared to traditional storage is that it returns only the rows and columns that satisfy the database query, not the entire table being queried. The database cloud server allows SQL processing to be performed on the data (or disk) side as much as possible, and all disks are operated in parallel. This reduces CPU usage on the database server, uses less bandwidth when moving data between the database server and the storage server, and returns query result sets instead of all tables. Eliminating data transfer and database server load can be a significant benefit to the traditionally limited bandwidth and CPU-constrained storage queries. Eliminating data transfer is also beneficial for online transaction processing (OLTP) systems that often include a large number of batch and report processing operations.
The solution provides split processing and bandwidth advantages without any modifications to the application. The database cloud server fully supports all the features of the Oracle database. The database cloud server is a single instance deployment for the Oracle database and for the Real application Cluster deployment. The management of Oracle data Guard, Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), Oracle GoldenGate, and other database Tools is the same regardless of whether the database cloud server is used or not. Users and database administrators still take advantage of the same tools and knowledge they are currently familiar with, as it is like running traditional non-Exadata storage.
2.3 Exadata Storage Server The Exadata storage server is an indispensable component of a database cloud server. Provides extreme performance through multiple features of the product. Exadata Storage provides database-aware storage services, such as the ability to offload database processing from a database server to storage while maintaining transparency with SQL processing and database applications. In this way, only the data requested by the application is returned, not all of the data in the table being queried. The Exadata smart Flash cache greatly improves the speed of Oracle database processing by accelerating I/O operations. Flash memory provides a smart cache of database objects to avoid physical I/O operations. The Oracle database on the database cloud server is the first flash-enabled database. Exadata storage provides an advanced compression technique, Exadata hybrid column compression, which typically provides 10 times times even higher data compression ratios. Exadata compression increases the effective data transfer rate by an order of magnitude. Oracle Database Cloud Server is the safest database machine in the world. Built on superior Oracle database security capabilities, the Exadata storage is capable of querying fully encrypted databases at hundreds of GB per second, with a performance cost close to zero. These features of the product, together with many other features, form the basis for the outstanding performance of the database cloud server.

Oracle Exadata Integration and cloud computing applications (i)