Exalogic is a

computer appliance A computer appliance is a computer system with a combination of Computer hardware, hardware, software, or firmware that is specifically designed to provide a particular computing resource. Such devices became known as ''appliances'' because of ...

made by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

, commercially available since 2010. It is a

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

-servers running

Oracle Linux Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is, in part, compile ...

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

preinstalled. Its full trade mark is ''Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud'' (derived from the

SI prefix The International System of Units, internationally known by the abbreviation SI (from French ), is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. It is the only system of measurement with official st ...

exa- A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The pre ...

'' and ''-logic'', probably from

Weblogic Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW, also known as Fusion Middleware) consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, co ...

), positioned by the vendor as a preconfigured clustered application server to use for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

with elastic computing abilities.

History

Oracle Corporation announced Exalogic at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

in September 2010. The company presented it as a continuation of the Oracle-engineered systems product-line which had started in 2008 with

Exadata Oracle Exadata (Exadata) is a computing system optimized for running Oracle Databases. Exadata is a combined database machine and software platform that includes scale-out x86-64 compute and storage servers, RoCE networking, RDMA-addressable ...

(preconfigured database cluster). Exalogic is a factory assembled

19-inch rack A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple electronic equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide. The 19 inch dimension includes the edges or ''ears'' that protrude from each side of the ...

of 42 rack units, completed with servers and network equipment. There are 4 configurations, at different prices, depending on what fills the rack. The weight of the full rack is about 1 ton (more than 2000 lbs), a quarter rack weighs half as much.

Hardware

The hardware component of the X2-2 appliance consisted of: a group of 1-unit

Intel Xeon Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...

servers, each equipped with two six-core 2.93 GHz processors and two

solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk. SSDs rely on non- ...

s for operating system and swap space; a common

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block device, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access Computer data storage, data storage devices, such as disk ...

; and a set of

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

and

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

switches. A full rack contains 30 server nodes, a half rack, 16, a quarter rack, 8, and an eighth rack, 4. Each server node has installed 96 GB of RAM, four

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (abbreviated 10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlik ...

interfaces, and a double InfiniBand port. The

for all configurations is similar, with 40 TB of raw space. The vendor's specifications and advertising content usually indicate the total parameters (360 processor kernels and 2.9 TB RAM for full rack). An X3-2 model was announced in 2012 with newer processors and more memory. Since late 2013 an X4-2 model is commercially available, it has yet more processor cores and four times as large capacity of solid-state drives.
The latest version of Exalogic compute nodes have two Intel E5-2699v3 2.3 GHz Xeon (18-core) processors and eight 32 GB DDR4 2133 MHz RAM for a total of 256 GB per node. Two 400 GB SSDs (RAID1) and redundant power supplies

Software

Two 64-bit operating systems run on the server nodes of the appliance:

version 5.5 or Solaris 11. All servers have an installed cluster configuration of

Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW, also known as Fusion Middleware) consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, co ...

and distributed memory cache Oracle Coherence. To run Java applications on a machine there is a choice of HotSpot or JRockit. Management of the appliance is available in the

Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is a set of web-based tools aimed at managing software and hardware produced by Oracle Corporation as well as by some non-Oracle entities. Releases Oracle Enterprise Manager includes three releases: Oracle Enterpri ...

toolset, which is also pre-installed in the appliance. A transaction monitor

Tuxedo Black tie is a semi-formal Western dress code for evening events, originating in British and North American conventions for attire in the 19th century. In British English, the dress code is often referred to synecdochically by its principal ...

is optionally supplied.

Customers

Exalogic is deployed by the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

Food and Drug Administration The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a List of United States federal agencies, federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is respo ...

(FDA) in the United States,

Amway Amway Corp. (short for "American Way") is an American multi-level marketing (MLM) company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada Township, Michi ...

, the

Hyundai Motor Group The Hyundai Motor Group (HMG; ; stylized as HYUNDAI) is a South Korean '' chaebol'' (loosely similar to a multinational conglomerate but without a central holding company or ownership structure) headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. The HMG a ...

, Bank of Chile,

Haier Haier Group Corporation () is a Chinese multinational home appliances and consumer electronics company headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong. Its Haier Smart Home Company affiliate, of which it owns 35%, designs, develops, manufactures and se ...

, and

Deutsche Post DHL Deutsche Post AG (), trade name, trading as DHL Group, is a German multinational corporation, multinational package delivery and supply chain management company headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is one of the world's largest courier companies ...

, Public Authority of Minors Affairs (PAMA) in Kuwait .

Criticism

Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, presumes that any appliance principally lacks scalability for the end-user compared with the infrastructure, supplied as service, and notes that the Exalogic approach is actually a rollback to the obsolete

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

concept. Also, commentators have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of placing the word "elastic" in the name, because, despite the ability to load balance, there are obvious computing limits of the box, and those limits cannot be transcended like they should be in a true elastic environment; the same criticism applies to all solutions designed for private cloud computing, in particular, it applies to

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

and

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

products. However, any computing environment is a collection of servers, and since many Exalogic machines can be combined, it is not limited to the single box capacity, which may be considered as merely a building block.

References

External links

* {{Oracle Cloud applications Exalogic Exalogic