How Oracle’s Latest Exadata Is Different from Its Predecessors

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.

To gain diversified exposure to Oracle, you can invest in the iShares US Technology ETF (IYW). IYW invests about 3.92% of its holdings in Oracle.

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.

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.