Oracle introduces Exadata Exascale: an intelligent cloud data architecture that delivers performance for all Oracle database workloads. With the new service, Oracle promises to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 95 percent.

Oracle has announced the general availability of Exadata Exascale: a new intelligent data architecture for the cloud. Essentially, Oracle is bringing Exadata to a hyper-converged cloud architecture where the solution runs virtualized on shared hardware.

Scalable cloud approach

By virtualizing the HCI environment, Oracle can scale the underlying resources as needed. The customer then pays for what they use. The increased efficiency means higher costs for users.

The Exadata database solution is at the top of Oracle’s portfolio and traditionally offers many options, but at a higher price. By opting for a more classic cloud approach, Oracle wants to make its offering accessible to a wider audience. Thanks to its scalability, smaller companies with lower workloads can now also consider the offering.

Exadata Exascale is available as part of Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure and on Oracle Database 23ai on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle also plans future availability for Exadata Cloud@Customer, OCI Dedicated Region, and multi-cloud environments.

The advantages at a glance

Oracle offers several benefits for Exadata Exascale:

• Elastic, usage-based resources: Resources are fully elastic and are charged only for usage, with no additional charges for IOPS. Each database is distributed across pooled storage servers for high performance and availability.
• Intelligent storage cloud: The exascale storage cloud uses RDMA-enabled storage and data-aware Smart Scan technology for fast database queries. For high fault tolerance, the data is replicated to three different storage servers.
• AI: Exascale uses AI Smart Scan for efficient data offloading and AI vector searches, enabling up to 30x faster performance.
• Intelligent OLTP: Intelligent communication between servers enables high-performance database scalability with low latency for critical transactions.
• Intelligent analysis: Data Intelligence offloads SQL queries to the exascale storage cloud, enabling high-throughput scaling for analytics.
• Database-based intelligent cloning: Advanced snapshots enable users to create space-efficient clones of databases that are immediately available and have the same performance and scalability as the source databases.

By translating Exadata to Exadata Exascale in a cloud-based HCI environment, Oracle can reach a wider audience with its powerful database offering that has traditionally been aimed at enterprises. The consumption model coupled with the lower barrier to entry can now also be attractive to smaller organizations.