Oracle Exadata Storage Server
When dealing with very large databases, queries still need to read data off disk, and then process it as quickly as possible. Over the last few years it has become apparent that I/O subsystem speed and bandwidth has become a major performance bottleneck for large-scale datawarehouses. Even while processor speeds have increased exponentially, existing storage solutionshave not seen the same increase in throughput. To solve this problem, Oracle introduced Oracle Exadata Storage Server, an intelligent storage solution that dramatically improves query processing.
An Oracle Exadata Storage server consists of 12 drives, 2 Intel processors each with 4 cores, and two InfiniBand cards. Oracle Exadata Software runs on each server, which allows queries to be off-loaded from the database server to the storage server. Each server can scan about 1 GB/sec of data, and can be stacked together to deliver additional capacity and bandwidth.
