1. Trumping Oracle Exadata
A short story

2. Introduction
One of the world’s most prominent technology companies recently evaluated Oracle’s Exadata against two Fusion Powered servers. Sometimes two can be bigger than Exa. 

3. Initial Situation
Prominent technology company needs fast and reliable infrastructure to service tens to hundreds of thousands of requests per minute
Architecture based on a pod-like design with many pods aggregated for scale
Transaction-driven application requires disproportionate amount of storage resources and disk-optimizing acrobatics

4. Stage 1 – Single Pod Design
Two Sun T5440 servers
2x NetApp 6080s
1X Performance Acceleration Modules
12 disk shelves
Output
75,000 IOPS
Result
Insufficient performance

5. Stage 2 – Single Pod Design
Two Sun T5440 servers
2x NetApp 6280s
2X Performance Acceleration Modules
12 disk shelves
4 shelves with SSDs
Output
208,000 IOPS
Result
Insufficient performance

6. Stage 3 – Single Pod Design
Exadata (½ rack)
Bundled servers
Bundled SSDs
Output
9,000 transactions per second
Result
Insufficient performance
VERY EXPENSIVE

7. Stage 4 – Final Single Pod Design
Two HP DL 580 G7 servers
10 ioDrives per server
1.28TB each, 12.8TB total
Output
Over 39,000 transactions per second from single server
2nd server for failover
Result
Best-in-class performance
Best-in-class price

8. High Availability – no problem
Oracle Dataguard
Already paid for with site license
RAC not required
Data Guard configuration consisting of a primary database and a physical standby database. From the primary database, redo is being transmitted and applied to the standby database. Log apply services apply the redo out of the standby redo log files to the standby database.
Source: Oracle.com

9. Final Comparison Exadata (½ rack) Two Fusion-powered servers
NetApp Disk Farms
Exadata (½ rack)
Two Fusion-powered servers
Improvement
Transactions per second
(IOPS based)
9,000
39,000+
4.3X
Rack space
Four 42U (servers + NTAP)
21U 8U
2.6X
Cost
Pricey
~$800,000
~$400,000 2X
Dollars per transaction
$89
$10 9X
Transactions per rack unit
429
4875
11.3X
Fusion-io estimates cost from Exadata to end Fusion-io solution is $2.8million savings per pod