I ran across this photo from 12 years ago and got to thinking it’s still more than 4X larger than the largest system you can construct for an Oracle database on Amazon’s RDS (Relational Database Service). This is a single Exadata Version 1 system spanning 3 data center racks.

Exadata Version 1 – Triple Rack System

This was one of the first systems I had seen at a customer site and it was a triple-rack configuration.

• 3 Data Center racks wide
• 528 CPU cores
• 504 disk drives
• 226 Terabytes of storage

Of course the latest Exadata systems are much more powerful than this, but it’s stunning when you realize that Amazon cannot match even 1/4 of this machine from 12 years ago. The largest Oracle database you can run in Amazon is around 50 Terabytes. The largest number of CPU cores you can have in Amazon is 64 cores, but that system (db.x1.32xlarge) will cost MORE than Exadata Cloud Service!