Exalogic is acomputer appliance made byOracle Corporation, commercially available since 2010.[1] It is acluster ofx86-64-servers runningOracle Linux orSolaris preinstalled.
Its full trade mark isOracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud (derived from theSI prefixexa- and-logic, probably fromWeblogic), positioned by the vendor as a preconfigured clustered application server to use forcloud computing withelastic computing abilities.[2]
Oracle Corporation announced Exalogic at the Oracle OpenWorld conference inSan Francisco in September 2010. The company presented it as a continuation of the Oracle-engineered systems product-line which had started in 2008 withExadata (preconfigured database cluster).[1][2]
Exalogic is a factory assembled19-inch rack of 42rack units, completed withservers andnetwork equipment. There are 4 configurations, at different prices, depending on what fills the rack.[3]The weight of the full rack is about 1 ton (more than 2000 lbs), a quarter rack weighs half as much.[4]
The hardware component of the X2-2 appliance consisted of: a group of 1-unitIntel Xeon servers, each equipped with two six-core 2.93 GHz processors and twosolid-state drives for operating system andswap space; a commonstorage area network; and a set ofInfiniBand andEthernet switches.[5] A full rack contains 30 server nodes, a half rack, 16, a quarter rack, 8, and an eighth rack, 4. Each server node has installed 96 GB of RAM, four10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and a double InfiniBand port. Thestorage area network for all configurations is similar, with 40 TB of raw space. The vendor's specifications and advertising content usually indicate the total parameters (360 processor kernels and 2.9 TB RAM for full rack).[4]An X3-2 model was announced in 2012 with newer processors and more memory.[6][7] Since late 2013 an X4-2 model is commercially available, it has yet more processor cores and four times as large capacity of solid-state drives.[8]
[9] The latest version of Exalogic compute nodes have two Intel E5-2699v3 2.3 GHz Xeon (18-core) processors and eight 32 GB DDR4 2133 MHz RAM for a total of 256 GB per node. Two 400 GB SSDs (RAID1) and redundant power supplies
Two 64-bit operating systems run on the server nodes of the appliance:Oracle Linux version 5.5 orSolaris 11.[5] All servers have an installed cluster configuration ofOracle WebLogic Server and distributed memory cacheOracle Coherence. To run Java applications on a machine there is a choice ofHotSpot orJRockit. Management of the appliance is available in theOracle Enterprise Manager toolset, which is also pre-installed in the appliance. A transaction monitorTuxedo[10] is optionally supplied.
Exalogic is deployed by theUniversity of Melbourne,Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States,Amway, theHyundai Motor Group,Bank of Chile,Haier, andDeutsche Post DHL, Public Authority of Minors Affairs (PAMA) in Kuwait .[11][12]
Mark Benioff, founder ofSalesforce.com, presumes that any appliance principally lacks scalability for the end-user compared with theinfrastructure, supplied as service, and notes that the Exalogic approach is actually a rollback to the obsoletemainframe computer concept.[13] Also, commentators have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of placing the word "elastic" in the name,[14] because, despite the ability to load balance, there are obvious computing limits of the box, and those limits cannot be transcended like they should be in a true elastic environment; the same criticism applies to all solutions designed for private cloud computing, in particular, it applies toEMC Corporation andHewlett-Packard products.[14] However, any computing environment is a collection of servers, and since many Exalogic machines can be combined, it is not limited to the single box capacity, which may be considered as merely a building block.
More surprising was to hear the software giant announce a piece of hardware, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. As its name suggests, it is Oracle's attempt to steal the cloud computing spotlight. It comprises a mix of Oracle software and high-performance hardware and is aimed at enterprises that want to build their own "private cloud" using their own hardware. Sounds suspiciously like mainframe computer.
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. A full rack would contain 360 CPU Cores, 2.8 TB (TeraBytes, 1 TB = 1024 GB ) of RAM, 6 TB of SSD, and 60 TB of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disk.
'The cloud is not in a box — you don't have to add more boxes to get scalability,' Benioff said
Placing the term "Elastic" in the name of this offering is stretching the accepted definition of the term as it relates to cloud computing ... You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased ... EMC and HP are both making solutions that fit this description ... use case ends, those resources are then returned to the common pool to be redeployed, just as they would be in a larger cloud infrastructure
