Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA

Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA is an Oracle Engineered System that saves time and money by simplifying deployment, management, and support of high availability database solutions. Optimized for the world’s most popular database— Oracle Database—it integrates software, compute, storage, and network resources to deliver high availability database services for a wide range of custom and packaged online transaction processing (OLTP), in-memory database, and data warehousing applications. All hardware and software components are engineered and supported by Oracle, offering customers a reliable and secure system with built-in automation and best practices. In addition to accelerating the time to value when deploying high availability database solutions, Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA offers flexible Oracle Database licensing options and reduces operational expenses associated with maintenance and support.

Fully Redundant Integrated System

Providing access to information 24/7 and protecting databases from unforeseen and planned downtime can be challenging for many organizations. Indeed, manually building redundancy into database systems can be risky and errorprone if the right skills and resources are not available in-house. Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA is designed for simplicity and reduces that element of risk and uncertainty to help customers deliver higher availability for their databases. The Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA hardware is an 8U rack-mountable system containing two Oracle Linux servers and one storage shelf. Each server features two 16-core Intel® Xeon® Gold 5218 processors, 384 GB of memory, and choice of either a dual-port 25-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) SFP28 or a quad-port 10GBase-T PCIe network adapter for external networking connectivity with the option to add up to two additional dual-port 25GbE SFP28 or quad-port 10GBase-T PCIe network adapters. The two servers are connected via a 25GbE interconnect for cluster communication and share direct-attached highperformance SAS storage. The base system's storage shelf is partially populated with six 7.68 TB solid-state drives (SSDs) for data storage, totaling 46 TB of raw storage capacity.

Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA runs Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Standard Edition. It offers customers the option of running single-instance databases or clustered databases utilizing Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) or Oracle RAC One Node for "active-active" or "active-passive" database server failover. Oracle Data Guard is integrated with the appliance to simplify standby databases' configuration for disaster recovery.

Optional Storage Expansion

Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA offers the flexibility to expand the storage shelf that comes with the base system by adding up to eighteen additional SSDs or hard disk drives (HDDs) for data storage. A fully populated storage shelf contains either twenty-four SSDs or six SSDs and eighteen HDDs for data storage, for a total of 184 TB SSD or 46 TB SSD and 252 TB HDD raw storage capacity, respectively. Customers can also optionally add a second storage shelf to double the storage capacity of the system. Also, external NFS storage is supported for online backups, data staging, or other database files.

Ease of Deployment, Management, and Support

To help customers quickly deploy and manage their databases, Oracle Database Appliance comes with Appliance Manager software to simplify the system's administration and diagnosis. The Appliance Manager feature dramatically simplifies the deployment process and ensures that the system and database configuration adheres to Oracle's best practices. The browser user interface quickly gathers all the configuration parameters to streamline both system and database provisioning with a few easy steps. The Appliance Manager also drastically simplifies maintenance by patching the entire appliance, including all firmware and software, using an Oracle-tested patch bundle explicitly engineered for the appliance. Simply select the appropriate patch bundle in the browser user interface to validate it and update the entire system. Database backup and recovery are integrated into the Appliance Manager to backup locally, external storage, or the Oracle Cloud directly through the browser user interface. The Appliance Manager also tracks system and database information and displays the information in the browser user interface. Built-in diagnostics continually monitor the appliance and detect component failures, configuration issues, and deviations from best practices. In addition, Oracle Database Appliance Auto Service Request (ASR) feature can automatically log service requests with Oracle Support to help speed resolution of issues.

Flexible Oracle Database Software Licensing

Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA supports both Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition. Enterprise deployments that require the enhanced feature set of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition can take advantage of a unique capacity-on-demand database software licensing model to quickly scale utilized processor cores without any hardware upgrades. Customers can deploy the system and license as few as 2 processors cores to run their database servers, and incrementally scale up to the maximum of 64 processor cores. This enables customers to deliver the performance and reliability that enterprise business users demand, and align software spend with business growth. Small enterprises, line-of-business departments, and branch office deployments that don’t require enterprise class features can license Oracle Database Standard Edition, allowing them to realize the benefits of Oracle Database Appliance to reduce costs and improve productivity.

Integrated Virtualization Support

Virtualization provides IT cost savings and better resource utilization through consolidation of multiple physical servers as Virtual Machines in an Oracle Database Appliance. It helps reduce space, power, and cooling for data centers and provides isolation for workloads to improve service quality for applications and databases. Oracle Database Appliance supports two types of Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) that can be quickly deployed using built-in user interfaces: Application KVM and Database KVM (a.k.a. database system). In an application KVM, customers manage the installation and maintenance of the application, while in the Database KVM, the Oracle Database Appliance manages the installation and maintenance of the Oracle Database. KVM database systems enable hard partitioning for Oracle Database licensing, where each KVM database system can have its own CPU pool that is automatically assigned during KVM database system creation, or share a CPU pool. Oracle Database Appliance simplifies the management of KVM database systems with built-in user interfaces. Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA also offers built-in high availability features, auto-restart, and failover for application KVMs.

Solution-In-A-Box Through Virtualization

Oracle Database Appliance X8-2-HA enables customers and ISVs to quickly deploy database and application workloads on a single Oracle Database Appliance. Support for virtualization adds additional flexibility to the already complete and fully integrated database solution by providing isolation between database and application instances. Customers and ISVs benefit from a complete solution that efficiently utilizes resources and takes advantage of capacity-on-demand licensing for multiple workloads by leveraging Oracle KVM hard partitioning.

Learn more: https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/engineered-systems/database-appliance/oda-x8-2-ha-datasheet-5730739.pdf