Oracle Exadata

Oracle Exadata (Exadata ) is a computing system optimized for running Oracle Databases.

Exadata is a combined hardware and software platform that includes scale-out x86-64 compute and storage servers, RoCE networking, RDMA-addressable memory acceleration, NVMe flash, and specialized software.

Exadata was introduced in 2008 for on-premises deployment, and since October 2015, via the Oracle Cloud as a subscription service, known as the Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure, and Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure. Exadata Cloud@Customer is a hybrid cloud (on-premises) deployment of Exadata Database Service.

Use cases
Exadata is designed to run all Oracle Database workloads, such as OLTP, Data Warehousing, Analytics, and AI vector processing, often with multiple consolidated databases running simultaneously.

Historically, specialized database computing platforms were designed for a particular workload, such as Data Warehousing, and poor or unusable for other workloads, such as OLTP. Exadata specializes in mixed workloads sharing system resources with resource management features for prioritization, such as favoring workloads servicing interactive users over reporting and batch. Long running requests, characterized by Data Warehouses, reports, batch jobs and Analytics, are reported to run many times faster compared to a conventional, non-Exadata database server.

Support Policy
As the platform has been around since 2008, Oracle has published information related to the end-of-support for older Exadata generations. In Oracle's published document titled Oracle Hardware and Systems Support Policies, they mention "After five years from last ship date, replacement parts may not be available and/or the response times for sending replacement parts may be delayed." To look up the "last ship date" of a particular Oracle Exadata generation, Oracle published a document titled Oracle Exadata - A guide for decision makers.