During his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Larry Ellison launched the new Exadata X3. The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.
For those who have seen the presentation, Larry’s focus with respect to the VMAX was how much faster the new Exadata system was (which you can find starting about 31 minutes into his keynote). And I am sure that message got through. However, the other message that seems to also have been delivered was something he may not have intended: if you have a serious Oracle workload, your only real option other than Exadata is VMAX. He even quotes that “EMC announced the latest and greatest of all the disk arrays.” I am not sure we could ask for much more.
But Larry is Competing with VMAX
Some will note that since all of the references from Larry were to point out how much faster the new Exadata is, EMC should be concerned. So why am I so thankful? First, Larry is well known (as most vendors are) for putting up big numbers. But with Exadata, the level of exaggeration has it’s own reputation in the market. Since it is not possible to run a normal I/O test against an Exadata, the tests all have to be done with an Oracle database. And how the tuning is done for that makes all the difference in the world as to the ability for any customer to ever get the same results. The VMAX numbers, on the other hand, are pretty simple to recreate. Connect up some servers. Have them all do large block sequential reads. Measure the results. After all, that is what EMC does to build the numbers in the first place.
And when replication is turned on, the EMC numbers are primarily limited by the bandwidth of the connections and the latency between the sites. From the feedback from customers at the OOW sessions this week, it sounds like they are seeing a much larger impact to their Exadata performance with Data Guard enabled than they had been led to expect by their Oracle sales teams.
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