Familiar 1U and 2U formats

The new Oracle X7-2 & X7-2L x86 Servers are available to price and ship. They follow on from Oracles line of x86 servers, the X5’s and X6’s but with new 25Gb/s Networking and extra support for NVMe drives by way of larger capacities and more per server.  CPU’s and memory are upgraded with Oracle choosing to offer five variants of the Intel Xeon® CPU from 6-Core to 24-Core. There is memory supports for 64Gb DIMMS so the  24 DIMM slots give a maximum memory capacity of 1.5TB.

The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) PCIe technology now allows the use of eight NVMe drives (previously four) in the 1U server. NVMe drives take a hike to 6.4TB each too. If I wanted to configure a 1U all flash server (and an application to warrant it) I might configure two low cost 480GB M.2 SATA SSD’s for a mirrored OS, no point in wasting NVMe or SAS SSD disk on an OS, and six 6.4TB NVMe disks and max out on the most expensive CPU’s and 1.5TB RAM then it would come to ~ €65,8444 list price. Say what! Don’t panic, X7-2 1U servers are available from €5K with single CPU configurations and regular SAS-3 disk and everything in-between. The 2U variant can now be configured with over 100TB of NVMe storage for extreme storage performance.

Oracle Database Usage?

Oracle still offer a variant with a high frequency 6-Core 3.4GHz CPU. This CPU will help those with CPU bound Oracle licensing to get good performance for a minimal amount of cores. You can have one or two of these 6-Core CPU’s. If using Solaris x86 you are not limited by CPU choice as free of charge Solaris container technology can act as an acceptable boundary for database licensing purposes.

Power

Depending on CPU and other component choices you can get the power draw down on a 768TB NVMe variant to as little as 500w, and that is at 100% utilisation!

Security

As the previous X6 range, this is not a generic server, Oracle owns 100 percent of the X7-2 server design and controls 100 percent of the supply chain and firmware source code. Motherboard, BIOS, and service processor firmware designed 100 percent by Oracle engineers and the entire manufacturing process controlled by Oracle—made in USA.

Operating Systems

These servers support multiple OS’s but you would only run either Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux due to the way Oracle support their servers, combined hardware and OS, there is no hardware only support option.

Questions or Configurations?

Give me a call anytime to see what suits you best or mail terry

[dot]cox[at]synoptix[dot]ie