Mark Hurd Talks Up Oracle Exadata

Oracle Co-president Mark Hurd may have avoided mentioning Hewlett-Packard during his keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on 20 September, but he had no shortage of things to say about Oracle.

The same day as Hurd’s keynote speech, his former employer confirmed that a settlement had been reached with the former CEO. Hurd resigned from HP in August after a scandal and was hired by Oracle in September. In announcing the settlement, HP and Oracle reaffirmed their strategic partnership, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was quoted as saying had “lasted for over 25 years.”

If Hurd was looking back, he gave no indication. Instead, he used his keynote to point out Oracle’s success.

“Oracle had a big Q1,” he told the audience. “Why is that important to you? It gives the company the capacity to invest, [the] capacity to invest in R&D and support.”

Exadata upgrade

One of the results so far is an upgrade to the Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine. With Exadata X2-8, the company is promising more storage capacity and faster database processing speeds. The machine now comes in four configurations: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack system, and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack, half-rack and full-rack systems. Both the X2-8 and the X2-2 can scale to multirack configurations, the company said.

Data warehouses historically have had four technical problems, Hurd explained: One, enterprises generate lots of data. Two, people want access to that data. Third and fourth, people ask hard questions and want them answered — quickly.

“When those four things come together, systems fall apart … You go out to send a query, and you’ve got to go find the data, and that’s why the queries take so long,” Hurd said. “Exadata, in its first release, changed the game.”

The latest release takes things a step further by beefing up processing power, he said.

The X2-8 features “two eight-socket database servers with a total of 128 Intel CPU cores and 2TB of memory,” the company said in a news release the same day, as well as more than “5TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to cache frequently accessed ‘hot’ data.” In addition, the X2-8 “provides the ability to query fully encrypted databases.”

“Security of data is a big issue,” Hurd said. “If I put my data in one place, I want to make sure it’s secure. Full database encryption for security, and in addition you now have the choice of Linux or Solaris. Oracle Exadata is now best in class for all database workloads. With the memory we now have in this system, the added speed, we can now do OLTP [online transaction processing] workloads better than anybody on the planet.”