Oracle Exadata X5: The Road To Ten Billion Dollars

Now that the dust has settled on the announcement of Oracle’s new Exadata X5 Database Machine, I’ve been doing some research in order to update my History of Exadata post (it’ll be ready soon). While reviewing the datasheets and other collateral for the X5 I was struck by the meteoric increase in one particular statistic: the number of processor cores on each database server. Oracle is riding that Moore’s Law train all the way to the bank.

The thing is, the number of cores per database server is directly linked to the cost of licensing the Oracle Database for each Exadata machine – and that means trouble if you are the one paying the bills. Assuming you buy a full rack – and that you license every core in every database server (which is the most common choice, since only a very brave minority would consider the Oracle VM Trusted Partitions option), your license cost has been increasing by 50% for each of the last two Exadata releases (X3-2 to X4-2 to X5-2). Let’s have a look at that in graphical form (click on the image to enlarge):

Let’s not forget here that I am only plotting the cost of licensing the database software. We are not taking into account the extra costs associated with paying for the hardware, licensing the storage servers or purchasing any of the pretty-much essential enterprise edition options such as Oracle RAC, partitioning, multitenancy or the diagnostic pack license. Nor are we considering the infamous 22% per annum software support costs. I’m also using the list price – which you would never expect to pay – but even if you used discounted prices the percentage increases would remain the same.

Anyway, after crunching the numbers it turns out there is good news and bad news…

Good News for Oracle

The good news for Oracle is that if Exadata continues to increase the number of cores at the rate of 50% extra per release, the list price for licensing the database software on the future X23-2 model will be $10.1 billion:

There’s no doubt about it – this will pay for a lot of yachts.

Bad News for Oracle

There is a downside though. As Kevin Closson has already shown, Oracle appears to be having trouble balancing the I/O capabilities of the X5 against this tremendously-increased compute power. Even after abandoning previous claims that a memory hierarchy with “low-cost disk” as the bottom tier would bring the “highest performance at the lowest cost” to customers, the new Oracle Exadata X5 “Extreme Flash” model (because apparently flash on its own isn’t enough, it has to be extreme flash) struggles to deliver an improvement in IOPS per flash device, as Kevin has shown.

Excerpt from the Oracle Exadata X5-2 Press Release

You wouldn’t think this from reading the press release, which promises “breakthrough performance and price per I/O” (emphasis added by me). Price per I/O, eh? That sounds like we take the overall price and divide it by the number of IOPS the system can deliver, right?

So let’s do that. And to be generous, let’s only look at the database license cost (ignoring all those other costs again) and take the maximum IOPS number from the datasheets (which in most cases is for unrealistic, 100% read only, fully cached workloads). How will it look? I’ll overlay it as a line (in blue) on top of the first graph:

Well it turns out that the price per I/O is actually falling: it’s down from $1.71 on the X4-2 (HP) model to $1.65 on the X5-2 EF. But three and a half percent is not much of an improvement considering the 50% extra on the price tag, is it? And as for offering a “breakthrough” price per I/O, the X2-2 was better at only $1.52 per I/O per second!

Summary

In my view, something is not right about the balance between compute and storage on the Exadata X5. It feels as though Oracle is bumping up the compute power faster than would be architecturally prudent because this results in a higher purchase price. Maybe I’m wrong – I have no insider knowledge and can only speculate… but when the Exadata X23-2 finally comes out in a couple of decades time, maybe we’ll know for sure.

Footnote

The comments section of this article makes for interesting reading, with responses from a number of Oracle employees – although not necessarily speaking on behalf of the mothership. The noteworthy (not to mention calm and measured) comments come from the Exadata Product Manager, Gurmeet Goindi. In addition I’d like to draw your attention to the following two URLs:

• Response from Germeet regarding Capacity On Demand (on the Oracle blog)
• Kevin Closson making an incredibly important point about Oracle’s Capacity On Demand offering