We do a lot of work with the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite and many of our customers do not have a ton of experience with the Oracle Database, nor do they want a huge Oracle infrastructure. What they do want is high availability and reliability on the platforms underpinning their IAM solutions. Over the years we have recommended Oracle’s Database Appliance for many of these situations. They are great little machines that don’t require extensive DBA knowledge to manage them. In recent years they have also added the ability to do virtual machines on top of them which introduces some other awesome opportunities (OAM/OIM in a box!)
Recently we ran across a salesman that was pushing our customer into using an Exadata 1/8th rack instead of the ODA. We put together this handy little spreadsheet for the customer.
| ODA X5-2 | Exadata 1/8 Rack X6-2 |
| 2 Database Servers | 2 Database Servers |
| 72 Cores | 44 Cores |
| 512 GB of RAM | 512 GB of RAM 1024 GB Optional |
| No Storage Server 128 TB Raw 64 TB Mirrored 42.7 TB Triple Mirrored |
144 TB Raw 72 TB Mirrored 48 TB Triple Mirrored |
| 10 GbE interconnect Optional Infiniband |
10 GbE interconnect Optional Infiniband |
| Rack mountable | Own standalone rack, cannot mount in existing datacenter |
| Optional Storage Expansion 256 TB raw 128 TB Mirrored 85.3 TB Triple Mirrored |
X6-2 Quarter Storage Expansion 144 TB Raw 72 TB Mirrored 48 TB Triple Mirrored |
| $68k + optional $40k storage expansion |
$220k US + $11k Memory Upgrade + $20k Storage Server Software + optional $300k storage expansion |
The ODAs really are powerfull little machines. We’ve run them at customers for 6+ years with no issues at all. Oracle really has a great solution in them that is overlooked by many organizations.