Oracle unveils Exadata X11M for enhanced AI performance

Oracle has unveiled Exadata X11M, the latest iteration of its Exadata platform, poised to enhance customers' workloads by improving energy efficiency and reducing hardware requirements.

The Exadata X11M provides increased performance for artificial intelligence (AI), analytical processes, and online transaction processing (OLTP) while maintaining the same pricing as its predecessor, Exadata X10M. According to Oracle, the system's enhancements contribute significantly towards customers' energy and sustainability goals by allowing them to manage workloads more efficiently across fewer systems.

"With Oracle Exadata X11M, we continue to provide customers with extreme scale, performance, business value, and the choice and flexibility to deploy wherever they need—from public cloud to multicloud to on-premises," stated Kothanda Umamageswaran, Senior Vice President, Exadata and Scale-Out Technologies, Oracle. "In fact, every leading cloud will be running Exadata X11M, including OCI, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure." He highlighted the financial savings and enhanced performance offered by the new platform.

The latest model comes optimised for the recent generation AMD EPYC processors, delivering notable improvements in performance across various workloads. Enhancements include a 55 per cent speed increase in AI Vector searches, greater data filtering capabilities, and 43 per cent faster in-memory vector index queries. Transaction processing and analytics capabilities are also seeing improvements with up to 25 per cent faster serial transaction processing and a twofold increase in analytics I/O throughput.

These advances are achieved while enabling customers to maintain the same expenditure as they currently incur with Exadata X10M. Oracle emphasises that through these updates, customers can execute larger workloads on equivalent infrastructures.

Exadata X11M's benefits also extend to improved energy efficiency and sustainability. The platform's high performance allows workload consolidation on fewer systems, reducing power consumption, infrastructure costs, and data centre space. The embedded intelligent power management features help customers meet their energy efficiency targets by optimising energy use and enabling control over power consumption during periods of lower usage.

The system offers deployment across various environments such as on-premises, multicloud settings, and Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure, maintaining consistency in Oracle Database's functionality. This flexibility ensures that Exadata X11M users can deploy workloads with ease, irrespective of their chosen infrastructure.

Oracle affirms that in multicloud settings, the new platform will be operable in major data centres such as OCI, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This multicloud compatibility provides access to features like Oracle Real Application Clusters, which promises enhanced scalability and availability.

Moritz Werning, Product Manager at Swisscom Ltd, expressed anticipation about the potential improvements in efficiency Exadata X11M offers, noting, "It's great news that Oracle Exadata X11M is available at the same time in all deployment options, including multicloud deployment. We look forward to gaining all the performance and price performance benefits as well as the efficiencies that Exadata X11M delivers."

Ron Westfall, Research Director at The Futurum Group, provided an external analyst perspective, stating, "The latest Exadata X11M allows organisations to decide where they want to gain the best performance for their Oracle Database workloads. And for everything from extreme vector processing to stock exchange-level transactions. Exadata X11M is clearly the gold standard by which all other platforms that try to run Oracle Database are measured."