Exadata Exascale was first introduced in 2024, and brings some big advantages over the ASM (Automatic Storage Management) architecture that we’ve had since Exadata was first introduced in 2008. You need to run Oracle Database 23ai to use Exascale, but that simply means you get access to over 300 new database features like AI Vector Search and JSON Relational Duality in 23ai.

More Efficient Space Usage

Exascale puts all storage in a single pool rather than separate Disk Groups for DATA and RECO (and the optional SPARSE Disk Group) we have with ASM. Those separate silos of storage end up wasting space and it’s not easy to change the allocations. Exascale storage capacity is simpler to manage because it’s pooled storage.

Eliminates Duplicate Management

You create an ASM Disk Group for RECO, then you create an FRA (Fast Recovery Area) in each database and put it in RECO. That’s a bit of duplicate effort that gets eliminated because Exascale doesn’t need a separate RECO area to hold recovery data like your FRA. You size RECO, then you size FRA for each database with ASM. With Exascale, you just size the FRA.

Vaults for Security and Resource Management

Within a Exascale Storage Pool, you have Vaults, which are logical constructs that provide security isolation and resource controls. You can have arbitrarily large numbers of Vaults, and it’s fast and easy to add more of them and change their resource limits. Each Vault can include limits on:

• Storage space
• IOPS
• XRMEM Cache
• Flash Cache

These controls let administrators keep one tenant from impacting another, meaning they prevent “noisy neighbor” problems. When I say “tenant” here, I’m talking about a Virtual Machine cluster, which contains one or more databases (more about that later).

Scale Extra Small to Extra Large

Exascale allows storage for a tenant to scale from Gigabytes to Petabytes, giving it a much wider range than Exadata with ASM storage. The smallest Exadata system gives you about 52 TB of storage for DATA for each Storage Server (with triple mirroring) and there is a minimum of 3 Storage Servers. You can easily see how the number of tenants (VM Clusters) gets large very quickly if you set the smallest storage for a tenant at 300 GB or even 1 TB in size.

Separation of Compute & Storage

ASM uses software running on each compute server to control allocation of and access to storage. This architecture creates a tight coupling between compute and storage. Exascale eliminates this coupling and provides better separation between compute and storage, making management simpler and more flexible.

Database Aware Thin Clones

Thin Clones are copies of databases that don’t consume space until changes are made. Being “database-aware” means there is a single DDL command to create them rather than using a bolt-on utility. Easy, fast, and space efficient copies of databases.

Multi-Generation – Mixed Disk Sizes

Disks often get larger from on hardware generation to the next. ASM requires equally sized disk slices. You could expand an older system with newer generation storage, but you would either sacrifice the extra space or create extra Disk Groups with that space. Exascale lets you just put the storage into the same pool and it handles it without sacrificing space.

VM Images on Shared Storage

The storage for a Virtual Machine includes the boot volume, Oracle Database homes (software) and other contents of a running VM. Exadata has always put VM images on each Database Server. Exascale lets you put VM storage on the Exascale shared storage, which brings multiple advantages as we will see.

Effectively Unlimited VM Storage

The amount of space each VM needs is relatively small compared to the shared storage of Exadata. Moving VM storage off the Database Servers to the Exascale storage side gives you access to more VM space than you’ll ever need, regardless of how many VMs you run.

Massive Numbers of VMs (tenants)

Exadata has been limited to 4, 8, or 12 Virtual Machines for each Database Server, but Exascale dramatically increases that limit. The highest number any customer has asked for was 25, so we doubled that to 50 as our initial limit. We want to make sure it’s rock-solid, so we put a stake in the ground and called it 50. One point about being “rock solid” is they ALL need to boot in a reasonable amount of time on server startup.

RDMA Enabled Storage – High Performance

All of the storage in Exascale is RDMA enabled, whether it’s being used for databases or VM images. The advantage is performance. RDMA is a protocol used by software for extremely low latency and fastest access. It’s completely unique to Exadata. The Oracle Database software makes RDMA calls, and that is only implemented on Exadata.

Live Migration is Coming

We announced at Oracle Cloud World last year that Live Migration would be coming to Exascale. This means that you’ll be able to move a VM from one Database Server to another without shutting it down. What makes this impressive is the fact that Oracle Database uses RDMA for communication and IO on Exadata. RDMA is extremely fast, but it turns Live Migration into rocket science.

Conclusion

Exascale is the next generation software architecture for Exadata. It provides advantages for databases and virtual machines, allowing you to scale from XS to XL in virtually any dimension.