Oracle and Intel Collaborate on Optane DC Persistent Memory Performance Breakthroughs

Intel Corporation and Oracle today announced that Oracle is incorporating the high-performance capabilities of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory into its next-generation Exadata platform, Oracle Exadata X8M. Exadata powers Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Cloud Applications and the high-performance database infrastructure at most of the world’s leading banks, telecoms and retailers.

Built using industry-standard 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel Optane DC persistent memory and 100 gigabit RoCE networking, Oracle Exadata X8M is designed to support today’s demanding Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), analytics and mixed workload database requirements, as well as database consolidation and in-database machine learning. This first-of-its-kind integration is designed to provide customers with superior performance for latency-sensitive activities such as high-frequency stock trading, internet of things (IoT) data processing, real-time fraud and intrusion detection, financial trading and applications requiring real-time human interactions.

“At Intel we’re focused on delivering a platform foundation to enable customers to unleash the value from data. The integration of Intel’s 2nd generation Xeon Scalable processors and Optane DC persistent memory across Oracle’s Exadata X8M products is an extension of our long-term partnership to deliver breakthrough solutions for enterprises across the globe,” said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Intel. “By enabling faster analytics and enhanced response times, our customers are experiencing what’s possible with Optane DC persistent memory.”

“Our collaboration with Intel sets a new industry standard for supporting databases with the highest performance and availability,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. “Oracle and Intel have integrated cutting-edge persistent memory technologies into the leading enterprise database machine to deliver real-time access to the most mission-critical data. This transcends the boundaries of conventional shared storage systems and servers that simply cannot keep pace with this level of innovation.”

Intel Optane DC persistent memory is a groundbreaking innovation in the memory-storage hierarchy that combines near-DRAM performance with the data persistence of storage. Enabled on 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Optane DC persistent memory enables greater total memory capacity per platform and much faster, byte-addressable access to persistent data than even the best-in-class SSD.

Exadata X8M’s implementation of Intel Optane DC persistent memory is unique in the industry, since Exadata uses sophisticated remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology to enable the database to directly access persistent memory deployed in smart shared storage servers, bypassing the entire OS, network, and IO software stack. This reduces IO latency in Exadata X8M tenfold compared with the previous Exadata release.

Exadata: 10th Anniversary of Collaboration with Intel

Exadata X8M represents more than 10 years of continuous innovations and deep engineering. Exadata today runs many of the world’s mission-critical applications, including four out of five of the biggest banks, telecoms and retailers. Over 77 percent of the Fortune Global 100 run Exadata. Exadata is the foundation for Oracle Autonomous Database, which uses machine learning to provide a self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing database service that delivers a much more reliable system with outstanding security that makes organizations and developers more productive.

Oracle provides choice and deployment flexibility, enabling customers to use Exadata anywhere – in Oracle Cloud, as the core of Oracle’s unique Gen 2 Exadata Cloud at customer service and on-premises.