Blogs

19 Takeways from Oracle OpenWorld 2019

It always takes some time to filter, sort and digest all the new information, updates and announcements after a big event. This year Oracle OpenWorld brought us new products, changes in the existing lineup and a glimpse of what is coming next. I don’t plan to describe in a short post all that happened there. Here I will try to note what was most interesting for me.

One of the major announcements was about expansions plans and deploying new regions in different parts of the world. The plan is to have 36 regions doing it with the speed of a region every 18 days on average. In Canada, we have only one data center in Toronto with one availability domain and that news gives us hope to have a proper DR in Montreal maybe around February next year.

Let’s continue with the engineering systems. A new X8M Exadata came to replace or augment the X8 model. The new machine has 1.5 TB of persistent memory on each storage cell, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) with incredible throughput (100 Gb/sec) and about 10 times less latency than the traditional Infiniband used in X8. Also, we are getting KVM instead of OVM for the new virtualization deployments. The KVM will work only on Exadata with ROKEE network and OVM only on Infiniband based machines. So, the new machine is faster and has better performance for the same price. That is good but you cannot connect the new X8M to a ZFS appliance using Infiniband as you could with the previous model. So, the combination of ZFS + Infiniband + Exadata doesn’t work anymore.

The next update is for those who want to get all benefits of a cloud and keep the data close by in their own data center. The new generation of Exadata Cloud at Customer (ExaCC) was beefed up by the new Exadata x8 hardware with better cpu, storage and the brand new control plane which is going to be located in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) now. The new ExaCC has some limitations on the current stage of deployment but in the next 2 or 3 quarters the most limitations are going to be lifted and eventually, we will be able to use the famous Autonomous database products in our own data centers with the ExaCC. And eliminating the plane rack release space, reduce complexity and the time for deployment.

A lot of updates about Oracle Linux. It is getting new self patching and self-repairing features following the lead of the autonomous database systems. Now it is called Autonomous Linux and can patch itself using the splice technology without stopping the system. It will increase the high availability for the entire solution based on it.

One of the most interesting announcements was the promise to implement completely flexibly and dynamic shapes for VMs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The new shapes or rather shapeless VM will allow dynamically scale CPUs and memory. It can open a new opportunity to scale up and down your application or database layer without deploying a “microservices” architecture. I am looking forward to seeing it in practice.

The Oracle Cloud Analytics products got special attention and a dedicated keynote delivered by the Oracle’s CTO Larry Ellison. The product looks very promising and potentially can help to get real value from your data relatively quickly. I will try to look at the product more closely.

More and more former PaaS products have been migrated from Oracle public cloud generation 1 (“Classic”) to the “Marketplace” on the OCI. From one side using the Marketplace creates a unified approach for all products but from the other side, we are losing some interesting options. The new family of products such as Oracle Data Integration and Oracle GoldenGate from the Marketplace is coming to replace Data Integration Platform Cloud (DIPC) which has had some unique features. It was possible to deploy it on other clouds and on-premises which is not the case for the new products. And it seems the Marketplace is the main strategic direction for all new products in the OCI.

One of the most exciting and engaging news on OOW 19 was announced new the new “Always Free” tier for all existing and new OCI customers. You can have a couple of oracle autonomous databases, two small compute systems and a load balancer running for free all the time. It provides the ability to test your applications, using ti for development and some other purposes. I think it deserves a dedicated blog post.

All this news was only the tip of the iceberg. Oracle OpenWorld was full of events and presentations. I strongly recommend keeping your eyes on the Oracle blog and Eclipsys site to do not miss any new blogs or updates.

More from this Author