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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly.Oracle, one of the world’s largest IT companies, kicked off its OpenWorld 2010 conference in San Francisco this week with a product announcement that is likely to make a splash across all enterprise hardware and software sectors. The company unveiled a new fully integrated hardware-and-software system for cloud-like application delivery.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud during his keynote on Sunday evening. The company describes it as an integrated middleware machine, which includes hardware and software systems built and optimized to run Java and non-java applications.
"Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a complete system of servers, network, storage, VM, operating system and middleware, all engineered to work together," Ellison said in a statement. "This delivers stunning results, including the fastest Java performance, elastic capacity on demand and a completely fault-tolerant system."
The vendor pre-assembles and delivers the machine in standard 19-inch 42U rack configurations, according to an Oracle white paper. There are different configurations for different density levels. It features hot-swappable compute nodes, a clustered disk-storage subsystem and a high-bandwidth interconnect fabric, linking every component within the system.
Numerous 10GbE ports are provided for integration with data center service networks and 1GbE ports for integration with data center management networks. The network fabric is based on lossless switched InfiniBand I/O technology, connecting all components within a configuration, as well as interconnecting multiple configurations to form a single fabric.
Up to eight full racks of either all-Exalogic hardware or a combination of Exalogic and Exadata hardware can be connected without any external switches. An eight-rack all-Exalogic set-up provides up to 2,880 processor cores, 22.4TB or RAM, 7.7TB of Flash memory and 320TB of disk storage.
Each 1U compute node is powered by two x86 64-bit six-core Intel Xeon processors, power supplies, fast ECC DIMM memory and redundant InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters. Each note has two solid-state disks, hosting OS images, as well as acting as high-performance local-swap space and storage for diagnostic data.
It runs Oracle’s WebLogic Server platform and other Java Oracle middleware products. Customers will be able to choose Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux operating system.
Oracle says the system is made to accelerate its entire Fusion Middleware product portfolio, which includes everything from identity management to application server to collaboration tools. It is optimized for integration with Oracle’s Database 11g, Real Application Clusters and the Exadata Database Machine.
Exalogic is available now in full-rack (30 servers), half-rack (16 servers) and one-quarter-rack (eight servers) configurations.