Building Scalable Storage Grids

Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Servers can be installed in to a standard 19-inch rack and are connected to database servers via InfiniBand. Exadata Storage Servers have dual 40 Gigabit InfiniBand links that provide connectivity many times faster than traditional storage or server networks. Further, Oracle’s interconnect protocol uses direct data placement to ensure very low CPU overhead by directly moving data from the wire to database buffers with no extra data copies.
Exadata Storage Servers are architected to scale-out easily. To achieve higher performance and greater storage capacity, additional Exadata Storage Servers are added to the configuration. This, combined with faster InfiniBand interconnect, Exadata Smart Flash Cache and the reduction of data transferred due to offload processing, yields very large performance improvements. A 10x improvement in query performance compared to traditional database storage architectures is common, with much greater improvement possible.