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I am just back from the UKOUG event in Birmingham and after meeting a number of industry leaders /  Oracle Evangelists one thing I realised is that everyone is doing work in their own space but it's time to give something back to the Oracle community. My plan is to do more of blogs in the Oracle Databases / Engineered system space.

This is my first set of Blogs on Exadata for beginners and thought to start with the History of Exadata.

From my childhood days whenever I used to start with a new subject , I always started with its history . There is not much written about the History of Exadata but my belief is that almost 10 years back Oracle was already the market leader in the database world and Larry would have thought that since he had already captured most of the database market it was time to delve into hardware and move into a more stack oriented architecture.

Oracle decided to build an Open hardware stack solution , yes that open word would be a surprise who know Oracle as Oracle makes money out of licenses . But the plan was to have an open hardware stack solution that would not require the proprietary hardware and would help them to compete with the likes of Netezza and Teradata . They did a tie up with HP (Hewlett Packard) , the entire hardware layer was supplied by HP and major components of software layer were supplied by Oracle, this is how we saw the launch of first exadata called the Exadata V1 or HP oracle database machine.

This was a perfect combination of hardware and software with two giants coming together to produce something of this kind.

But only the core directors at Oracle would have known that Larry's aim was to take Oracle to a different league altogether which was to "own the entire stack of hardware and software layer", and just 1 year later Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems a step closer to Larry's dream and with this acquired the entire hardware stack & the know-how that they were missing from several years.

So the entire HP kit was replaced by the Sun kit and that's how we saw the launch of second Exadata : Exadata V2.  Since then there have been several advancements and Oracle has released a series of Exadata Servers starting from X2-2 (2010) to X7-2 (2017) and this is highlighted in the table below and will be discussed in next blog.

So, we can summarize this as below:

Year 2008

• Oracle plans to build an Open Hardware Stack Solution
• No Need for Proprietary Hardware
• Compete with the likes of Netezza & Teradata
• Oracle Launches Exadata V1 (HP Oracle Database Machine)

 Year 2009

• Acquisition of Sun Microsystems
• There was a U-turn on the idea of open solution
• Entire HP kit replaced by the Sun Kit.
• Oracle launches Exadata V2

I believe that was the launchpad Oracle got and since then we have seen loads of advancements in the Engineered Systems space where Exadata architecture has been kept as a base and certain other layers have been added on top of it to develop a new product , to name a few :Oracle ZFS , ZDLRA , Big Data Appliance (BDA) , Oracle cloud machine.

Kshitij Joy (OCM) 

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