Oracle Server Architect Emphasizes ExadataOracle Server Architect Emphasizes Exadata

The technological urge to merge is evident in Oracle's high-flying Exadata database machine, which is a platform combining hardware and software in a manner totally tuned towards the objective of fast OLTP. I was put in mind of this by Bob Evans' latest column, Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Hardware Boasts Are Nonsense, Says IBM. That got me thinking about my recent chat with John Fowler, Oracle's executive vp of systems, where he provided some insightful perspective on architectural trends.Fowler knows his platform innards. Prior to his current Oracle gig, he was executive vice president of Sun's systems group and chief technology officer for its software organization. (Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January.) I spoke with Fowler to gather material for my InformationWeek Analytics State of Server Technology 2010 research report. (Hurry and you can still download the full report for free.)

The coming together of my Fowler interview, conducted back in March, and Bob's column, began when I read the money quote from Bob's piece. Commenting on the importance of these tuned systems, Bob wrote: "There's something. . .significant at play here: the shape of high-end platforms and systems that will play essential roles in enterprise architectures for a long time to come." That's precisely the topic upon which Fowler shed some light in our chat. His basic point is that the speed advances in storage and network connectivity are feeding back into the design constraints for servers. So, whereas previously it was mostly about increasing performance by upping processor core counts, now designers can capitalize on the availability of fast I/O. That's particularly advantageous when you're constructing database and/or online transaction processing systems, because a lot of what that's about is reading and writing data from the database. (Doh!) Here's the relevant exerpt.