Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)

Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) has been around for years. Introduced around 2011. Since then Oracle has continued to give strong support to this engineered all-in-one highly available database solution

This “all-in-one platform” is one of the best features for busy IT shops as everything comes built-in including shared storage, interconnect, database servers, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Deploying an Oracle RAC cluster on a generic platform requires the coordination of multiple IT teams – DBAs, SAs, Storage Admins, and Networking group. The ODA makes this process much, much simpler. Getting you up and running with a high availability database quickly.

At the time of this writing, Oracle just introduced its newest X5-2 version. The X5-2 is delivered with 8TB drives, replacing the original 4TB drives. The new High Capacity storage shelf supports 128TB raw storage capacity that will provide 64TB of usable space with Normal redundancy (double-mirrored) and 42.7TB with High redundancy (triple-mirrored). Being an engineered solution gives you best practices out of the box including solid-state drives. The X5-2 is now supplied with 4 x 400GB SSDs for frequently accessed data and 4 x 200GB SSDs to improve the performance of database redo logs.

The benchmark we took on the X5-2 solution compared to the old non-engineered solution was very impressive. Most workloads were 3x faster. DML was greatly improved thanks to the SSD for the redo logs. Results of course vary based on how much engineering you put into your non-ODA configuration.