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The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

Sep 20, 2010  By Mitch Frazier
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Everybody likes talking about the weather. In the computer world that seems to mean talking about cloud computing. The latest cloud on the horizon is the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, announced yesterday (Sept 19th) at Oracle OpenWorld 2010.

The Exalogic Elastic Cloud is targetted at Enterprises that want to create their own private clouds. Exalogic installations consist of up to eight 42U racks. Each Exalogic rack contains hot-swappable compute nodes, a disk subsystem, multiple 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a high-bandwidth InfiniBand interconnect for connecting the components to each other and to other Exalogic racks or to Exadata Database Machine racks. Exalogic configurations are designed to be redundant.

Each 1U "node" in an Exalogic rack consists of two Xeon chips. Each Xeon chip is a 6-core processor running at 2.93 GHz. Each node has redundant InfiniBand connections. Each node also contains two solid-state disks (SSD) for the operating system and for local swap space.

An full rack would contain 360 CPU Cores, 2.8 TB (TeraBytes, 1 TB = 1024 GB ) of RAM, 960 GB of SSD, and 40 TB of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disk. Sorry though, there's no video card so you can't use this for your desktop.

Due to the use of the InfiniBand interconnect the components of an Exalogic installation can be interconnected in numerous ways. This allows the system to be subdivided as needed for configuring your private cloud. InfiniBand is referred to as a switched fabric communications link, it uses switches to interconnect different components connected to the fabric. InfiniBand grew out of the merger of "Future I/O" (Compaq, IBM, and HP) and "Next Generation I/O" (Intel, Microsoft, and Sun) in 1999.

Exalogic systems run either Oracle Solaris 11 or Oracle Linux 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The management software is called the Oracle Elastic Cloud Software and it uses the Oracle WebLogic Suite. The Suite includes:

  • Oracle Coherence - Java based data caching, data replication, and distributed computing services.
  • Oracle JRockit - a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) developed by Appeal Virtual Machines, later bought by BEA Systems.
  • Oracle HotSpot - another JVM developed by Sun Microsystems.

For more information, and to read Oracle's name a few more times, see the whitepaper Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: A Brief Introduction.

______________________

Mitch Frazier is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal.

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Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 10:16.

http://www.cilekerotik.com

shared

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 10:15.

http://www.cilekerotik.com

Just another FUD

Alfred E von Neumann's picture
Submitted by Alfred E von Neumann (not verified) on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 04:01.

Have you ever used an email acct with an IMAP client & server? Welcome to the cloud, clueless.

Uh?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 08:35.

Uh?

Just another fad?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 09/21/2010 - 14:27.

"Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964. The last known running Multics installation was shut down on October 30, 2000 at the Canadian Department of National Defense in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.[5]"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics)
-------
Myths about Multics
http://www.multicians.org/myths.html
-------
http://www.multicians.org/

If the "cloud" were so good it wouldn't be necessary to promote it so heavily.

I can only hope that all this "cloud" stuff - IMHO just a rehash of Multics - goes away into oblivion as quickly as possible... AFAIK, the "cloud" is insecure, unreliable, and *unnecessary*. Overall, a bad idea. But maybe I am wrong, and the "cloud" is the best thing to ever happen to IT since the discovery of the electron... Time will tell - but I won't bet on the "cloud".

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