This is my dive into the storage software and WOW is it impressive.. I am selecting from a 200+ million row table (no indexes).. Without storage software it takes 3 minutes to scan the whole table.. really impressive. Then with the storage indexing it takes 30 seconds to come back with a distinct column value. 6 times faster..
Then I was really impressed when I used a Unique key lookup.. No index, it took 8 seconds to find the data, compared to 189 seconds. 23x faster with the Storage software.
Next I made the table parallel 64.. Now it comes back in 3 seconds (no storage software), and 1 second with storage software.. Unbelievable numbers.
One of the first things I noticed is that the Exadata makes you rethink your redo log sizes. When loading data a lot of my waits are waiting on the redo to flush out because it is so small.
All in all the storage software looks pretty impressive.