Exadata Database Service overview

(serene music) - Hi friends, and welcome to the Oracle University module on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Exadata Database Service. I'm your host, Hannah Nguyen. Let's get started. So today, we're going to take a look at Exadata Database Service, our premier database cloud service that runs on Dedicated Cloud Infrastructure or on Exadata Cloud@Customer. Over the next few minutes, we will take a look at this service, and also highlight some of the key features that further cement Exadata Database Service as the best way to run your Oracle databases in the cloud. Before we get started, let's examine the Exadata platform. Exadata is the best platform for running the Oracle database. It provides superior performance, scalability, availability, and security at the lowest cost. Deep engineering integrates the hardware and software to create this optimized database platform. We use the best hardware available on the market, but what makes Exadata special is the smart database aware system software. This software implements specialized algorithms to improve processing of all types of workloads, including OLTP, analytics, batch, and of course consolidation. We then combine that with smart management tools to make Exadata easy to manage, and to ensure that it is always deployed and configured consistent with best practices. Lastly, note that Exdata is available both on premises and in the cloud. It's the Exadata deployment in Oracle Cloud, known as Exadata Database Service, on which we will focus today. Why is Exadata the fastest OLTP platform? It starts with super fast access to storage. Remote direct memory access, or RDMA, allows the database CPU cores to read data from and write data directly into the memory of intelligent storage servers without involving operating system or networking stack overhead. This combined with the extremely low latency of persistent memory located in intelligent storage servers lowers both SQL read and write latencies, which are two of the most critical factors impacting OLTP performance on a database system. With a combination of RDMA, fast networking, and persistent memory, SQL write latencies are as low as 19 microseconds, and overall transaction processing IOPS are the industry best. One of the advanced features supported on Exadata is Oracle Real Application Clusters, also known as Oracle RAC. Oracle RAC allows you to scale database instances across multiple database servers for greater performance and higher availability. Exadata also includes advanced features to run Oracle RAC better and more reliably than other platforms. All these enhancements make Exadata the best platform for OLTP with lowest latencies, highest throughput, best availability, and lowest costs due to more efficient resource utilization. Exadata is the best analytics platform. The original Exadata innovation is storage offloading. Exadata can push work down to the storage servers, leveraging the enormous disk I/O and compute capacity of the many storage servers, pushing, scanning, filtering and joins to the storage servers frees up the database servers for other tasks, but more importantly allows large volumes of data to be analyzed in parallel, while returning only the smaller relevant result set to the database servers. Exadata makes intelligent use of different classes of storage, from persistent memory to hard disk, caching the hottest data and the fastest storage. This provides the performance of PMem and flash with the economics of HGD, making Exadata ideal for analyzing the largest data sets. Storage indexes track ranges of data on disc, eliminating the need to even access vast amounts of data during analytics. Hybrid Columnar Compression stores data in a compressed analytics-friendly columnar format, reducing I/O and speeding queries. Finally, In-Memory Columnar extends the In-Memory Columnar representations of operational data to the much larger flash memory in the storage servers, allowing storage servers to quickly sift through even more data, and boosting overall performance. It should be no surprise that a system that provides the best transaction processing and best analytics makes the best consolidation platform. This means all workloads will benefit from Exadata, simplifying consolidation, especially those with mixed workloads. The extreme performance of Exadata means you can consolidate more workloads with fewer resources, reducing overall costs. Exadata understands the latency sensitivity of different operations. It can, for example, differentiate between log rights and normal database rights, or OLTP over batch. It prioritizes latency sensitive operations, ensuring they are not bottlenecked behind other operations. It has sophisticated resource management of both CPU and I/O, allowing you to prioritize based on a variety of different characteristics. Lastly, Exadata supports multiple virtual machines with hundreds of container databases and each supporting thousands of PDBs, giving you flexibility to consolidate, while isolating to satisfy business requirements. The proof of the success of Exadata is in the customer base. 87% of the Fortune Global 100 run Exadata, and 45% have already adopted Exadata in the cloud. You probably don't go through a day without doing something, be it buying a cup of coffee or checking your bank balance online, that ultimately interacts with an Exadata system. Exadata runs the largest warehouses, the most critical OLTP systems, all kinds of packaged apps, both on-prem and in the cloud, and is a favorite of corporate IT for consolidating thousands of databases. This is truly a testament for its ability to provide superior performance and service levels for all workloads. Now that we've talked about the Exadata platform, what does it mean to run Exadata in the Oracle cloud? One of the greatest differentiators of Exadata versus other database platforms is the flexibility it gives you in terms of where to deploy. You can run it on premises with a traditional CapEx deployment model, where you own and manage the complete system and have total flexibility as to how you will manage it. You can also run it in the cloud, where Oracle manages the infrastructure. You have automation to simplify your management task and can leverage a pay-per-use subscription model that can dramatically reduce your costs. Oracle offers Exadata in the public cloud with Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, but running your databases in the cloud does not mean you have to put your data outside of your data center. With Exadata Cloud@Customer, you can benefit from a cloud deployment, but keep all of your data safely inside your own data center. In order to effectively replace on-premise data centers for critical applications, enterprise-grade cloud data management must fulfill the following requirements. First, the compute storage and infrastructure must be able to easily scale to whatever performance or capacity levels needed by the applications, and scaling must be done online without downtime. Next, the database software available in the cloud should support the same functionality, service levels and interfaces used by the on-premises version of the applications. It's not sufficient to offer migration tools from one database to another if the latter degrades the user's experience. In particular, advanced features, such as clustering of multiple servers, synchronous replication, and sophisticated backup and recovery cannot be easily replaced, nor can the performance and the reliability that is engineered through tight integration between the software and underlying infrastructure, as it is typical of critical on-premises systems. Once moved into the cloud, critical databases need to support new cloud native applications via extensions to the database software for functions such as JSON, machine learning, IOT, et cetera. After all, most of the organization's important data is already in those databases. Thirdly, providers of applications must be committed to the cloud platform and its software infrastructure, and enjoy a strong partnership with the cloud provider, especially when priority one problems require multi-party escalation support. Finally, the cloud provider, data management, and application software vendors must all demonstrate enterprise maturity in their software support, maintenance, and release practices. Oracle not only offers the world's number one database with features that are simply not available with other databases, but also offers the best data management platform in the cloud, with Exadata to help customers migrate to the cloud. This is just a quick summary of some of the enterprise capabilities you get with Exadata Cloud. On the left are all the key features available in the Oracle database, and includes important features, such as Multitenant, Oracle RAC, and Active Data Guard. On the right, all the Exadata data innovations available with the Exadata platform, including recent additions, such as persistent memory and 100 gigabits per second RDMA over converged ethernet. Exadata Cloud includes all of these key capabilities and innovations in a single cloud platform. Here is an illustration of the Exadata cloud architecture. Exadata uses a scale out architecture that runs database services cooperatively on both database servers and storage servers. Each Exadata infrastructure in the cloud consists of a collection of database and storage servers connected by a high performance secure fabric. Each physical database server hosts one or more database virtual machines where the database instances run. The VMs provide consistent high performance and isolation between the virtual database servers and the infrastructure. The database VMs and storage servers communicate over the secure fabric, and RDMA over converged ethernet internal network that provides ultra high speed compute to compute and compute to storage networking. The client and backup networks provide 25 gigabits per second connectivity for high bandwidth use cases, such as application connectivity, backup, data loading, and disaster protection using Data Guard. They connect directly to your network, either in the public cloud or in your data center. Oracle CloudOps manages the infrastructure via a secure, separate, and isolated cloud management network. You manage the database servers by connecting to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure control plane to perform lifecycle tasks and management through powerful and simple cloud automation. We realized that while public cloud works well for many customers, not everyone can move their workloads to the public cloud. Sometimes regulations or policies require the data to remain under your control in your data center. Sometimes the problem is latency between the database and the application. If the application must remain on-prem because it runs on specialized hardware, then the database needs to remain on-prem. Often there is a many to many relationship between applications and databases, making it impossible to move a few to the public cloud and leave the others on-prem. Those left behind will see unacceptable latencies when connecting to those in the public cloud, and it's way too difficult to move everything at once. Lastly, there are many companies that are just not ready for the public cloud yet. They want the control over their data and are not yet comfortable outsourcing that to someone else. For these reasons, Oracle's able to meet you where you're at, and lets you run the cloud in your data center with Exadata Cloud@Customer. Let's look at how the Exadata Cloud@Customer architecture differs from Exadata Cloud Infrastructure to allow you to run the Exadata Cloud in your data center. In your local data center, we deploy a full featured Exadata system in one or more racks, similar to what you would get with an on-prem deployment. We add two local control plane servers that talk to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure control plane. The local control plane servers create a secure tunnel from the Exadata Cloud@Customer in your data center to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Over that tunnel, we send telemetry to monitor the health of the system, as well as accept REST API calls from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to manage the system. Oracle operations can access Exadata Cloud@Customer in your data center should issues require their attention. Your administrators connect to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure control plane via a web UI or API calls to monitor and manage the database VMs and database instances running on the Exadata Cloud@Customer. End users and their applications connect over your internal corporate network directly to the Exadata Cloud@Customer, as if it were any on-prem database server. This gives you the same experience as you would get with Exadata Cloud Infrastructure in Oracle's public cloud, but all your data stays inside your data center. We've covered the Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, running in either your data center or an OCI. Now, we are going to see how that infrastructure is used to provide database as a service powered by Exadata. There are two database services that can run on Exadata in the cloud. The difference is the management model of the service. For the most control over your service, we offer Exadata Database Service, a service jointly managed by you and Oracle. You can also choose to run the autonomous database on Exadata in the cloud, where the database manages itself. Both services are available either in the public cloud with Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, and on premises with Exadata Cloud@Customer. The focus of this module is Exadata Database Service. So we'll restrict the rest of our discussion to that service. First up is Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure, which runs on Exadata Cloud Infrastructure in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, and was previously known as Exadata Cloud Service. For those of you willing to run it in the public cloud, this is the ideal solution for running enterprise class databases as a service in the cloud. You get all the power and functionality of the Oracle database, plus that of the Exadata platform. It is dedicated to you, but still provides all the cloud benefits of Oracle managing the infrastructure, extensive cloud automation, and pay-for-use cloud economics. Purchase your license as a service or bring your own license. Exadata database is 100% compatible with existing applications running in the Oracle database, which makes it simple to move to Exadata Database Service. With Exadata Database Service, Oracle operations manages the infrastructure which includes the hardware, the physical database, and storage servers, and any internal networking. You only manage the database virtual machines and the database instances in those virtual machines. To simplify that management, Exadata Database Service includes sophisticated automation, allowing you to initiate lifecycle operations, provisioning, updates, backups, and more through easy to use web-based user interfaces, as well as programmable APIs. You only need to license the cores your VMs are using, and you can scale those VMs up and down at will, enabling you to match your subscription fees to those resources you are actually using. With a short minimum 48 hour term for provisioning the service, there's virtually no financial commitment to a deployment. That same Exadata Database Service is also available on Exadata Cloud@Customer, and it is called Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer. It provides the same management model, cloud automation and APIs, and flexible subscription based economics. The difference is that with Exadata Cloud@Customer, all of your data is in your own data center. You use public cloud regions to host the control plane managing your service. With Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer, you can easily combine a cloud database service with your existing on-prem applications and infrastructure without the disruption of migrating some or all of it to public cloud data center. The data stays in your data center, next to your applications, satisfying any data residency compliance requirements that apply to your business. It's important to note that since Exadata Cloud@Customer Infrastructure must be shipped to your data center, there is a minimum four year term for all infrastructure subscriptions. Let's take a minute to look at the importance of vertically scaling your virtual machines. Licensing costs are based on the number of OCPUs or cores in use. Scaling the cores in use by your VMs as your workload scales up and down is important to reducing your costs, and is one of the greatest advantages of cloud over on-premises deployments. When you deploy an on-prem system, you must size it to handle the peak workload, as on-prem deployments do not support scaling up and down. In fact, you probably oversize it a little, as it is difficult to scale an on-prem system, and you want to ensure capacity for workload spikes. However, during normal operations, the system is underutilized, and you're paying licensing fees on unused processor cores. Contrast that with an Exadata database service deployment, where you can scale the service up and down, depending on demand. If you have a workload spike, simply scale up to accommodate. If demand drops, scale the system down. Unlike most cloud database services, Exadata Database Service allows you to scale online with no disruption to the database service. Exadata Database Service on Exadata Dedicated Infrastructure, or Exadata Cloud@Customer, is available via a choice of two cost-effective licensing models. You first subscribe to Exudate Cloud Infrastructure in Oracle Cloud, or Exudate Cloud@Customer. You then have a choice of license included or bring your own license pricing based on the infrastructure of the number of OCPUs you use. License included consists of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, along with all of the database options and management packs. Bring your own license allows you to utilize existing on-premises Oracle database and option licenses in Oracle Cloud. Exadata Database Service follows a simple cloud management model. Oracle owns and manages the infrastructure. This includes the database servers, VM hosts, storage servers, and the fabric network. You can schedule maintenance windows for Oracle to perform infrastructure maintenance. When you subscribe to Exadata Database Service, you are responsible for managing everything running in the database VMs. You manage the VMs, grid infrastructure, and the databases using the cloud automation tools. The powerful cloud automation gives you complete control over the components you manage, while freeing your database administrators from the burden of traditional database management tasks. Finally, of course, you own everything inside the database. This includes data, schema, and encryption keys. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a wide choice of management interfaces that can be used with Exadata Database Service. The easiest to use is the web browser interface, which allows you to use a browser to graphically configure and initiate operations. This is great for one-time actions but most customers prefer a more programmatic interface for things done repeatedly, such as provisioning and patching databases. Anything you can do with the browser, you can also do with a corresponding REST API. Similar to the browser, the REST APIs transit the internet via HTTPS and require no special software installed on the local system. All interfaces are also exposed via a command line interface that can be used for scripting and for building custom tooling, and there's a software development kit to integrate with common languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. If you prefer to manage your infrastructure as a code, there is also a Terraform and Ansible interface. Cloud automation simplifies most lifecycle and management tasks, including scaling server resources up and down, creating databases and database homes, scheduling infrastructure maintenance, updating and upgrading the VM operating system, grid infrastructure, and databases, performing backup and recovery options, and even enabling disaster recovery protections through Data Guard. This is just a sampling of the automation and is not an exhaustive list. A key feature of Exadata Database Service is that Oracle best practices are built in. You no longer need to comb over technical briefs and documentation to figure out how to best deploy your database for best performance, availability, and security. Just deploy using the cloud automation, and your system will be optimally configured to provide the highest service levels. It automatically deploys Oracle RAC to provide a scalable, highly-available database, tuned to run on the Exadata platform. Oracle RAC protects from unplanned failures by spreading work across multiple database instances. In addition, it eliminates downtime for maintenance activities by automatically migrating work off the servers about to undergo maintenance to others that remain online. Also, backups and replication with Data Guard can be easily configured for disaster recovery using the control plane. In fact, Exadata Database Service supports all the Oracle maximum availability technologies which form the high availability blueprint for Oracle databases in the cloud. Data Guard is a key database feature that provides real-time disaster protection. Should you lose your primary database or data center, you can fail your workload over to a standby site maintained automatically by Data Guard. You can choose between synchronous or asynchronous transport of data to the disaster recovery site, optimizing for performance or zero data loss. Setting up Data Guard is a critical component of any maximum availability architecture solution, and Exadata Database Service makes it simple to enable with a single API call or click of the mouse in the UI using cloud automation. Likewise, the automation supports critical use cases, such as switching your primary database to your disaster recovery site, switching back, and reinstating your primary database after a failover. Automatic database backups can be configured during or after database deployment. Depending on whether you're running in the public cloud and OCI or Exadata Cloud@Customer, you'll have a choice of backup destinations, including cloud object storage, your own NFS server, or even a zero data loss recovery appliance. Simply click your destination and choose a retention policy. Your data will be automatically protected, and you can restore it at any time to either the latest or at an earlier point in time. Your database backups are also encrypted to protect them from unauthorized access. Defense In-Depth is Oracle strategy to control IT systems to permit authorized work and prevent, detect, and respond to unauthorized work. Defense In-Depth works by implementing controls throughout the Oracle stack to strike the prudent balance of risk mitigation and operational efficiency. The bubble drawing on the slide shows the concentric circles that protect data expanded out so that you can see how each ring adds to the Defense In-Depth posture. The Exadata Database Service security posture starts by securing the data in the Oracle database. Oracle database security features lead the industry to help prevent unauthorized data access and include the following, transparent data encryption to encrypt user data at rest, data redaction, masking, and subsetting to permit users to only see the relevant data to do their job, T Vault to separate the control of TDE keys from control of the Exadata infrastructure, customer VMs and databases, Database Vault to control DBA access so that DBAs are prevented from accessing user data with SQL queries, Database Firewall to control what SQL statements can be executed against the database, and Data Safe to automatically detect sensitive data and assess risks so that you can better secure your database. The Exadata Database Service compute and storage resources are based on the Exadata Database Machine, and include secure technical implementation guidelines, compliant deployment to minimize software configuration risks, minimum packages to minimize software security risks, and token based SSH access for secure login to service accounts. The networking is implemented with OCI Virtual Cloud Networks, or VLANs, to isolate access to your databases. To further protect database user and application connections, Exadata Database Service provides Oracle native network encryption to encrypt connections from database clients and applications to the Oracle database, and dedicated client and backup networks for traffic isolation. By integrating the security features throughout the stack, Oracle's engineered systems approach to Defense In-Depth security provides you the control you need to govern how your cloud services can be created, accessed, used, maintained, and destroyed. One part of security that deserves special attention is how Oracle limits infrastructure access by Oracle operations using Operator Access Control. Many organizations using Exadata Database Service are attracted to the cloud economic and operational benefits, but are required by regulations to retain the control and visibility of their data, and any infrastructure in their data center. With Operator Access Control enabled, cloud operations staff members must request access to your system. Your IT team grants a designated person access to a specific component for a specific period and with specific privileges. You can view audit controls in real time, and if you see something you don't like, you can kill the operator's access, session, connections, and processes. This gives anyone, and especially customers that need to regulate remote access to their infrastructure, the confidence to use Exadata Database Service. Since we introduced this, we have seen a tremendous interest from customers in regulated industries, who see this as finally enabling them to take advantage of the many benefits of the cloud. Let's review the key takeaways from this module. Exadata Database Service provides exceptional performance, availability, and security. It does this through a combination of superior architecture and value added software engineered to create a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts, with redundancy built in to prevent outages from common failures and Data Guard enabled for disaster recovery, Exadata Database Service provides the highest levels of availability. As we just saw, multiple layers of security provide Defense In-Depth Security. Exadata Database Service provides higher value and lower TCO. The increase in performance reduces the overall infrastructure needed to support consolidated workloads. Elastic scaling allows you to continually match the resources that you're paying for to your requirements, eliminating overspending, and cloud automation lowers management costs by reducing the effort to manage the system, eliminating error-prone human operations. Lastly, Exadata Database Service is the simplest, fastest, and safest path to the cloud. It is 100% compatible with existing Oracle applications, so you can move to the cloud with a little effort. It provides the same functionality in the public cloud with Exadata Cloud Infrastructure and in your data center. In fact, Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer lets you safely adopt the cloud without ever having your data leave your data center, making cloud adoption simple and safe. We hope you found this overview of Exadata Database Service interesting and educational. For more detailed information on Exadata Database Service, review the additional modules in this course. Thanks for hanging with me, and I hope you learned something useful. (air whooshing)