A Closer Look at Oracle Big Data Appliance

The Big Data appliance in more detail: what the make-up of the machine is, what software we are putting on the machine and how it integrates with the Exadata machines.

Oracle Blogs, By Jean-Pierre Dijcks on Oct 14, 2011

[I will] go through the big data appliance in a little more detail so everyone understands what the make-up of the machine is, what software we are putting on the machine and how it integrates with the Exadata machines.

Oracle Big Data Appliance

The machine details are as follows:

18 Nodes - Sun Servers
2 CPUs per node, each with 6 cores (216 cores total)
12 Disks per node (432 TB raw disk total)
Redundant InfiniBand Switches with 10GigE connectivity

To scale the machines, simply add a rack to the original full rack via InfiniBand. By leveraging InfiniBand we generally remove the network bottlenecks in the machine and between the machines. We chose InfiniBand over the 10GigE connectivity because we do believe network capacity of 40Gb/sec is a valuable asset in a Hadoop cluster. We also think that using InfiniBand to connect the big data appliance to an Exadata machine will have a positive influence of the batch loads done into an Oracle system.

Oracle Big Data Appliance

The software we are going to pre-install on the machine is:

Oracle Linux and Oracle Hotspot
Open-source distribution of Apache Hadoop
Oracle NoSQL Database Enterprise Edition (also available stand-alone)
Oracle Loader for Hadoop (also available stand-alone)
Open-source distribution of R (statistical package)
Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop (also available stand-alone with ODI)

The goal of this software stack combined with the Sun hardware as an appliance is to create an enterprise class solution for Big Data ...

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