OpenWorld: Oracle touts integration benefits of Exalytics BI box

Oracle fleshed out details of its Exalytics ‘engineered system’ at Oracle OpenWorld Monday, which the firm claims will put SAP’s rival in-memory analytics system Hana to shame.

Exalytics is based on a Sun Fire server featuring 1TB of RAM, and an Intel Xeon E7-4800 processor with 40 cores. It also features Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase for data processing, and the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database.

Exalytics might look like an appliance, and sound like one based on its description as “the industry’s first in-memory hardware and software system”. However, Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence (BI), was keen to point out that Exalytics is not an appliance in the traditional sense of being a “closed box that you can’t tune”.

The idea behind Exalytics is to offer firms an extension of their BI usage, moving beyond reporting and dashboards to modelling, planning, forecasting and predictive analytics.

Oracle shops will also be pleased to hear that Exalytics can be connected to the Exadata database machine via InfiniBand. The product also features the now almost obligatory requirement of iPad support, for BI users who cannot be parted from their beloved tablets.

Oracle was keen to promote the benefits of an integrated single vendor system, where the BI tools are configured especially for the firm’s hardware.  “Anyone who has Oracle BI or Essbase can immediately take advantage of Exalytics without any development,” Rodwick said.

While this might be an advantage in terms of reduced set-up time and compatibility issues, not all customers will like being the idea of becoming reliant on one provider.

Rodwick argued that other vendors providing similar tools – no doubt aiming at SAP Hana – are also limited by the size of the memory on offer, and also lack scalability.

“To me, Hana hasn’t done anything for the speed of thought data visualisation,” he said. Rodwick was referring back to a comparison first made by Oracle chief Larry Ellison during his keynote on Sunday night, that Exalytics is faster than the speed of thought, and can answer queries before they have even been fully asked.

Exalytics pricing details were not available, but this piece of kit will no doubt cost tens of thousands. Rodwick said he expected it to be “a very attractive price point for as few as 100 users”, adding that up to 50,000 users could be accommodated from a single solution.