What is OGB Appreciation Day?

The Oracle Groundbreakers (OGB) Appreciation Day formally known as OTN Appreciation Day and ODC Appreciation Day, is a great initiative by Tim Hall aka Oracle-Base.com.  Where we take the opportunity to say thanks to the Oracle Community which includes but not limited to ACEs, Java Champions, Ambassadors and all those who have the Groundbreakers spirit #ThanksOGB 🙂

I wonder what will be the name will be next year 😉

More info on Oracle Groundbreakers Community can be found here:
About Oracle Groundbreakers Community

When is it?

This year, it is on Thursday 10th October 2019 and I have to confess I totally missed it and thus my post is a few days out but I didn’t want to do disservice to the spirit of the initiative.

You can see my previous post here:
2017 – ODC Appreciation Day : Oracle Exadata Database Machine
2018 – ODC Appreciation Day : Oracle dcli Utility

You can see a summary of previous years blog posts here:
2016 – OTN Appreciation Day : Summary
2017 – ODC Appreciation Day 2017 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksODC)
2018 – ODC Appreciation Day 2018 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksODC)
2019 – OGB Appreciation Day 2019 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksOGB) – this year

My Contribution : Exadata X8M

When I was at Oracle Open World 2019 a few weeks ago, Larry Ellison (CTO of Oracle) announced the new Exadata X8M:

Key point being in-memory performance utilising persistence memory and RDMA Network over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), which I will detail later on in this blog post.

Larry also boasted the Exadata X8M storage is 50x faster then AWS and 100x faster then Azure All flash storage:

Following the announcement I attended another 2 sessions with Juan Loaiza (Executive Vice President, Mission Critical Database Technologies, Oracle) and Kothanda Umamageswaran (Senior Vice President, Exadata Development)/Gavin Parish (Senior Principal Product Manager, Exadata Development), who gave more details on the Exadata X8M:

The keys changes are:

1. 100Gb/Sec RoCE internal fabric
2. 1.5TB Persistent Memory per storage server/cell

RoCE Networking

RoCE stand for RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over Converged Ethernet, which initially from the start of Exadata had been over InfiniBand, however Oracle stated Ethernet has caught up and surpassed InfiniBand giving 100Gb/sec throughput as opposed to 40Gb/sec with InfiniBand which is 2.5 times faster:

RoCE uses InfiniBand RDMA software on top of Ethernet, so includes all the optimisation and allows for backwards compatibility:

Also mentioned is the smart network prioritisation which can prioritise critical database messages such as transaction commits, cache fusion over backups, etc using Class of Service:

An another nice addition is instance failure detected through use of RoCE, because if all 4 ports don’t respond it confirmed server failure and instantly evicted from cluster:

Persistent Memory

The Exadata X8M uses Intel Optane DC persistent memory a new silicon technology that capacity, performance and cost is between DRAM and flash:

In the Exadata X8M, the persistent memory is shared, just as disks and flash are.  So you get all the benefit of aggregated performance, redundancy, etc:

The benefit of RoCE with persistent memory is the Persistent Memory Data Accelerator, that allows the database to use RDMA instead of I/O bypassing network and IO software, interrupts, context switches:

Another benefit of persistent memory is the Memory Commit Accelerator, which like Smart Flash Logging, uses persistent memory to further speed up log writes by 8x using oersistent memory as a buffer which is flushed to flash or disk later on:

Smart capacity management of persistent memory, so primaries on persistent memory and secondary on flash, which is automatically moved to persistent memory when primary is unavailable:

If Exadata was not fast enough, all this innovation has lead to the “Worlds Fastest Database Machine” with a astonishing 16 million IOPS with less then 19 microseconds:

For more information on Exadata X8M can be found here.

Finally Happy OGB Appreciation Day! #ThanksOGB #ThanksODC #ThanksOTN 🙂

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)