Monday, November 28, 2011

Calxeda

Have you heard of Calxeda ?? If not, here is a little information on it

http://www.calxeda.com/technology/architecture

When talking about big data, and the future of data centers, Calxeda has to be in the center of the conversation.  Calxeda represents the ideas of true parallelism in a small form factor.  HP is going forward with this product in their project "moonshot".
http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx
With these low power modules you can fit 2,800 servers in a single rac.  Amazing but these numbers are even more amazing.

•89% less energy


•94% less space

•63% less cost


So why am I talking about this ?  This type of processors will cause a revolution in our field (again).. This architecture will allow processing to scale vertically at a very reasonable cost.  Going wide and going parallel in a true MPP environment will be possible, and at a low power, and low cost.  WOW.

So what is this going to do to Databases, especially with a company like Oracle ? Well, I would guess a 2,800 node RAC cluster would beyond what most people would consider reasonable.  I believe OLTP is going to remain the way it is now..  Rac clusters, usually scaled more horizontal then vertical.

But what is going to everything else that is not OLTP systems that may not need to be ACID compliant ?  Parallel on another database.  Hadoop is really gathering steam, and Oracle has stepped on the bus.
Here is Oracles latest white paper on data warehousing.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/big-data-for-enterprise-519135.pdf



Oracle definately has it's sights on Hadoop being part of its "data warehouse appliance".

Keep your eyes open and follow what is happening with this trend of lots of small low power servers.  It certainly is affecting my planning (I am a technical planner after all).  I am making sure all the systems I design are ready to go fully parallel when the time comes. 






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