OOW2011 : Oracle Exalytics Intelligence Machine
So the big announcement for Oracle BI customers at Larry Ellison's keynote on Sunday evening at Oracle Openworld was the Oracle Exalytics Intelligence Machine, a new hardware and software combination from Oracle that aims to provide "speed-of-thought" analysis based around OBIEE 11g and the TimesTen parallel in-memory database.
Based on what was announced today, Exalytics is part of the same family as Exadata and Exalogic, in that it is a combination of hardware, software and engineering that you can't get by just installing off-the-shelf products. The key components in Exalytics are:
- A four socket,
4840-core server with 1TB of DRAM and locally-attached disks - OBIEE 11g (based on a future release)
- The TimesTen parallel in-memory database, with a 200GB/sec scan rate
- An in-memory parallel version of the Essbase OLAP Server
- An updated user interface for "speed of thought" analytics
- Fast infiniband connection to Exadata
Here's a picture of one just outside the keynote hall:
Exalytics is designed to solve the problem of aggregating and analyzing large volumes of data, and would be used alongside source databases such as Oracle Database, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server or stand-alone Essbase databases. Typically, customers would use it in conjunction with Exadata, so that Exadata does the heavy-lifting around filtering and searching large amounts of data, and Exalytics, through the in-built TimesTen database and Essbase server, does the aggregation. The diagram below shows the products working together.
There's a lot more I could say, but at this point let's wait and see what information Oracle put into the public domain. Suffice to say, it's a very interesting development that will apply to both Oracle and non-Oracle customers, and will work alongside technologies such as Exadata, Essbase and Oracle OLAP. Watch this space over the coming months, and also look out for the Oracle Press book I'm working on which will include a whole section on Exalytics and TimesTen.