Exalytics - Primer

“For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene. That gap is set to widen.” 

said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England. This was in the context of high frequency trading and the need for high-speed networks connecting the financial districts. This comment gives an idea of the increasing use of technology in delivering near speed-of-thought experience(s).

And the trend is similar in the Analytics/Business Intelligence world too, wherein customers/users expect almost zero-to-negligible latencies. The world wherein the user waits after he keys in a set of parameters and waits for the report, no longer exists or is fastly diminishing.

So what do the customers expect of a business-intelligence/analytics application? Three things:

1. Extreme performance
2. Accurate results
3. Combination of the #1 and #2 to support critical decisions

Extreme workloads are something that many of our customers see on a day-to-day basis and this needs an equally powerful hardware+software combo. For example, one of our customers, Paypal, who has some of the most technically sophisticated requirements with very demanding workloads moved to Exadata, and saw the significant improvements in their flows, and all this migration happened in just a matter of 60 days. Also, downtimes are fastly becoming a things of the past - 99.9% SLA means that the application would be still be down for 'sometime' during the year. Amazon's and Google App Engine's recent outages are standing examples of outages even when apps are deployed on the cloud; you are not 'all-time-up' even if your applications are spread across multiple-availability-zones.

But lets not digress and try to understand what does Exalytics bring to the table.

At first i will try to quickly explain what is NOT Exalytics, as our competitors seem to conjure up extremely false notions about this simple (yet powerful) Engineered System solution concentrated at the Analytics scene.

Exalytics:
    - is NOT RDBMS
    - is NOT hardware *alone*
    - is NOT just some in-memory cache
    - is NOT rocket science(for that matter, only rocket science is rocket science)
    - is NOT many other things that has been falsely stated

So what IS Exalytics then? As always, Oracle has published a nice introduction to this product and i would recommend that you read it first, as i would not like to reproduce the content in here. The doc explains clearly the software, hardware, user-experiences, etc and gives an extremely simple and understandable introduction to Exalytics.

But, i will also try to quickly summarize the Exalytics offering. As we have seen, extreme workloads require equally powerful systems to process them and also monitoring mechanisms to take care of the entire setup. The Exalytics product-line is essentially:

• industry-standard hardware
• market-leading business intelligence software and 
• in-memory database technology (just to add, this is heuristic adaptive in-memory caching : what data is best stored in-memory for overall best performance, and adapts to changing workloads)

So, as a customer(i.e, IT guy), you might ask, 'what does this give me except for the user-experiences'? Well, this is what it offers:

• powerful compute 
• abundant memory
• fast networking
• kickass software

And as we know compute, memory, networking and the applications are the 4 pillars of the engineered systems arena; and Oracle is offering the best of the breed technology in here. Your Analytics-IT requirements are now easily taken care of by Exalytics (which runs OBIEE) while you concentrate on your actual niche - i.e, 'your business'. 

And all this is being offered by ONE vendor(namely Oracle), so that you don't have to run from pillar-to-post for any support or escalations. Understanding this is important (as we had seen in one of the earlier post on TCO), as you might very well be inclined to create your own server-class system either by purchasing components from different vendors and assembling them or running them on component PCs.

And the best part about all this is, you don't need to restructure or redesign or learn a new language to migrate your applications to Exalytics.

• If are an existing customer of OBIEE, then you can move the software seamlessly onto the Exalytics hardware and get-up-&-running in no time. Do not believe us? Check out this video by one of our customers who has moved to Exalytics in a matter of days, hence proving our claim that 'Exalytics requires no application redesign'.

• If you are not an existing customer of OBIEE, then i would recommend that you should take a peek at the Exalytics+OBIEE stack and actually do a TCO comparison of your existing system with Exalytics. OBIEE has been proven as an extremely powerful and successful BI product providing fast, interactive and on-target analytics. And with Endeca also being certified on Exalytics, now it becomes all the more easy to work on unstructured data. Check out why one of our customers chose Exalytics in the following video.
  
  

I will limit this post here, and let you explore other resources, customer stories and demos at http://www.oracle.com/exalytics