I'm not sure why there wasn't a major announcement about this, but as of April 9, customers buying an Exalytics machine to speed up their Oracle Business Intelligence can get 2.4 Tb of PCIe flash drives from Oracle certified and engineered to run on Exalytics. The cost (as of April 9's price list) is $35,000 (search for "flash upgrade kit").
While I haven't seen one in action yet, the flash pack seems to be 6 Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Cards each of which has a capacity of 400 Gb. These cards run amazingly fast with read times of more than 2 GB/second (write time is about half that speed at 1+ GB/second). These cards normally sell for almost $6K each, so Oracle is providing the flash add-on pack for no more markup than you'd get if you bought them on your own (but you'd then have to get them into the Exalytics machine all on your own).
This Matters If You Own Essbase
Why would you want this? Essbase, primarily. Essbase uses a ton of disk I/O and one of the ways Exalytics can speed up Essbase is by pulling your cubes into a RAMDisk (since you have 1 Tb of RAM to play with). At some point, though, it has to get that data from physical drives to a RAMDisk (unless you're building all your cubes at start up in memory each time). Having blazingly speedy flash drives with .25 millisecond read latency allows you to store your cubes on the flash drive and then pull into RAM much more quickly than reading from traditional drives.
We have tested Essbase running on flash drives and it helps everything (particularly minimizes the negative effects of fragmentation since seek time drops to basically nothing on flash). For customers buying Exalytics primarily for Essbase, the Exalytics Flash Upgrade Kit should be strongly considered with every Exalytics purchase (and if you already own Exalytics, buy it to put on top).
OBIEE is much less affected by hard drives, so while it may help OBIEE, this really matters a lot more to Essbase customers.
Since we're on the subject of Exalytics, now that 11.1.2.3 is out, all Oracle EPM/Hyperion components certified to run on Linux will run on Exalytics PS2. These include:
- Administration Services
- Calculation Manager
- EPM Workspace
- Essbase Server
- Essbase Studio Server
- Financial Reporting
- Interactive Reporting (32-bit only)
- Oracle HTTP Server
- Planning
- Profitability and Cost Management
- Production Reporting (32-bit only)
- Provider Services
- Reporting and Analysis Framework Services and Web Application
- Shared Services
- Web Analysis
Someone recently told me that they just upgraded their Hyperion applications to 11.1.1.4. I asked them why they didn't go to 11.1.2. They gave me the standard story about wanting to wait until the current version got stable (even though 11.1.2.0 came out over 3 years ago in April of 2010).
What they didn't know (cause apparently it hasn't been communicated well) is that Hyperion 11.1.1.x support drops from Premier Support to Sustaining Support in July of 2013 (only two months from the time I'm writing this). For anyone who doesn't know, Sustaining Support is equivalent to life support. While Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy does say that you can stay on versions of Oracle's products indefinitely, they don't agree to fully support them.
At the Premier Support level (the one all products start on), you get all the support you'd expect. When you call in, the support people help you find the bug, they patch it in the next release, you install it, and life goes on happily. Also, as new versions of supporting products come out like new versions of Office, Windows, or your web browser, Premier Support will make sure the Oracle products work with these new versions.
Extended Support (if offered at all for your Oracle product) comes about 5 years after a product is released. At this point, Oracle will still let you do all the Premier Support things, they'll just charge you a premium for doing so. Extended Support will not be offered on Hyperion 11.1.1.x (there aren't enough customers to warrant it).
Sustaining Support (AKA "life support") allows you to call in to ask for support. Oracle will help you with questions, look up your problems in their knowledgebase, and help you troubleshoot. They won't patch anything, make versions available that are compatible with new releases of Windows, Office, etc., and in general do anything beyond the bare minimum required. From Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy document from March 2013, here's what Sustaining Support doesn't do:
- New updates, fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates
- New tax, legal, and regulatory updates
- Certification with new third-party products/versions
- Certification with new Oracle products
And Hyperion (Oracle EPM) 11.1.1.x falls to this level in July 2013. To point out the obvious, if you're not already planning an upgrade to 11.1.2.x, you should start now. You really don't want to be on Sustaining Support for long. Since 11.1.2.3 just was released last week, I would probably hesitate going to that version until the first patch set update is released (probably this summer). If you're doing your upgrade before then, I would suggest going to 11.1.2.2.xxx (the current patch of 11.1.2.2).
If you want to read the sunset dates (the dates they drop to Sustaining Support) for all the current releases, visit Oracle.com for the current Lifetime Support Policy. Here's the one from March 2013 (scroll to page 22) for the Hyperion products:
http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-applications-069216.pdf
