
How Oracle’s Latest Exadata Is Different from Its Predecessors
By Anne ShieldsApr. 23 2015, Updated 11:06 a.m. ET
Important changes to Exadata X5
As we have seen in the earlier part of the series, Oracle (ORCL) has launched the latest version of its Exadata, Exadata X5. Exadata is powered by an Intel (INTC) Xeon E7 v2 chip. The notable technology upgrades to Oracle’s Exadata X5 include its flexible or elastic configuration, capacity on demand (or COD) pricing of the DBMS software, and the availability of Oracle Virtual Machine (or OVM). We’ll explain flexible configuration in a later part of the series. According to Gartner, apart from Oracle, Teradata (TDC) and IBM (IBM) are leaders in this space.
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COD licensing
COD lets the customer license Oracle software in a phased manner instead of licensing the entire Exadata configuration. Thus, now, the whole Exadata configuration no longer needs to be licensed. Only a minimum of 40% of the cores in a server must be licensed. With Exadata X4 and X5, the COD feature can be used.
Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Machine (or OVM)
To cater to the customers that require an additional level of association or multiple-tenant isolation, or cloud services deployment within the Exadata platform, the Exadata X5 supports virtualization with OVM. Like COD licensing, Exadata OVM Trusted Partition licensing too requires a minimum of 40% of the cores in the system to be licensed.