The big announcement about it is today at OpenWorld (it would be awesome if they mentioned it during the Intel keynote tonight), but the Exalytics X4-4 is actually available now. It's the same price as the X3-4 ($175,000 at list not including software, maintenance, tax, title, license, yada yada). This does mean the X3 is - effective immediately - no longer available, but then again, since the new one is the same price, I'm not sure why anyone would want the older one. No word yet on if you can upgrade an X3 to an X4, but since they did offer an upgrade kit from X2 to X3 (though I never heard of anyone buying it), I'm guessing there will be one for those wanting to make an X3 into an X4.
The main improvement over the X3 is the number of cores: it's still 4 Intel chips, but those chips all now have 15 cores on them, meaning the X4 has 60 cores compared to the X3's 40 cores. Here are the important details:
- 4 Intel Xeon E7-8895v2 processors running at 2.8 - 3.6 GHz
- 8 - 60 cores (capacity on demand, more on this in a second)
- 2 TB of RAM
- 2.4 TB of PCI flash
- 7.2 TB of hard disk running at 10K RPMs (not that fast these days)
- 2 Infiniband ports running at 40 Gb/s
- 4 Ethernet ports running at up to 10 Gb/s
You probably heard about this last July. Oracle worked with Intel to design a line of their Xeon E7-889x chips specifically for Oracle. What we didn't realize until we saw it show up on the X4 spec sheet was that the chips were going in the Exalytics X4. Simply put, on the fly, Exalytics can vary how many cores it uses and when it's fewer cores, the speed goes up. If it's running 15 cores per chip, Intel sets the speed to 2.8 GHz. If it's only using 2 cores per chip the speed goes all the way to 3.6 GHz (a GHz is one billion clock ticks per second).
Happy Father's Day, everyone! I got up early this morning to write about my recent experience traveling the world on Oracle's behalf. I got to attend the first annual Oracle Technology Network tour of Africa and the Middle East. It made 2 stops in North Africa (both in Tunisia), 2 stops in Saudi Arabia, and the final stop was in Dubai, UAE.
Tariq Farooq first mentioned the idea of doing a MENA (Middle East & North Africa) tour to me in Beijing last fall. He asked if I'd be willing to travel half-way around the world to speak to people in English that primarily spoke French and Arabic, and I - of course - said "yes." Here's Tariq being interviewed by Lillian Buziak at Collaborate 2014 (audio is a bit difficult to hear):
I had two reasons for wanting to go: I do love educating/evangelizing for Oracle EPM, BI, and Business Analytics. The possibility of reaching new audiences for the first time was exciting. My other reason for going was that I wanted to experience totally different cultures than I ever have before. I've spoken on 5 continents (now 6 after this tour and I'm anxiously awaiting the OTN Tour to Antarctica) before and have seen presented everywhere from a women's college in Mumbai that was 95F with no air conditioning in the presentation room to a ballroom in the Philippines that had 3 simultaneous English sessions going on (in one room!) all happily observed by smiling Filipinos. From China to India to Australia to Germany, I have seen some amazing slices of life, but nothing prepared me for the differences I saw on this tour.
In each of the sections below, I have linked the header to a blog from my new best German friend, Bjoern Rost. He blogged after every stop and unlike me, he actually understood all the Oracle RDBMS sessions on the tour. Visit http://portrix-systems.de/blog/author/brost/ to see his entertaining blog posts. (Warning: though I think Bjoern is hilarious, being German, you may find his posts to be 'not funny.' German humor is an acquired taste.)
I left for the first stop, Tunisia, on Memorial Day (in the USA), May 26, 2014...
