Oracle announces industry's first engineered system for Extreme Analytics

3 Oct 2011 San Francisco - Oracle has unveiled the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, the industry's first in-memory hardware and software system engineered to run analytics faster than ever, provide real-time speed-of-thought visual analysis, and enable new types of analytic applications.

Oracle Exalytics enables organisations to make decisions faster in the context of rapidly shifting business conditions while broadening user adoption of business intelligence (BI) though the introduction of interactive visualization capabilities that make every user an analyst.

Organisations will be able to extend their BI initiatives beyond reporting and dashboards to modelling, planning, forecasting, and predictive analytics. Planning applications can be scaled across the enterprise with faster, more accurate planning cycles.

This new system combines Oracle's proven Business Intelligence Foundation with enhanced visualization capabilities and performance optimizations, an optimized version of the industry-leading Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with analytic extensions, and a highly scalable Oracle server designed specifically for in-memory business intelligence.

In contrast to data warehouse appliances and in-memory BI tools, Oracle Exalytics is the first engineered system featuring in-memory software and hardware and an optimized BI platform with advanced visualization

To minimize integration cost, time and effort as well as on-going maintenance, Oracle Exalytics is engineered as a single vendor system featuring the widely used Oracle BI and in-memory database software configured for hardware designed, built and supported by Oracle.

Oracle Exalytics is comprised of:

• Oracle's Sun Fire server featuring 1 Terabyte of RAM and the Intel Xeon E7-4800 processor with a total of 40 cores;
• Oracle BI Foundation software including Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase featuring performance optimizations and an improved visualization environment for interactive analysis without limits on underlying data and classes of users; and,
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics, based on Oracle's proven in-memory RDBMS with lightening fast response times, enhanced and optimized for business intelligence.

Organisations running Oracle Business Intelligence can take advantage of existing skill sets, resources and personnel to deploy Oracle Exalytics.

Existing reports and dashboards built with Oracle BI Enterprise Edition and Oracle BI Applications run on Oracle Exalytics without any changes.

Oracle Exalytics delivers innovative capabilities spanning:

• Speed-of-thought interactive visualization that enables casual users to perform free form exploration of large, dense data sets to easily spot patterns, trends, and outliers;
• An immersive mobile experience for Apple iPad users that can scale to many thousands of mobile users, making analysis available to everyone, anywhere; and,
• Adaptive in-memory technology that optimizes performance for best responsiveness, even when data is larger than the available Exalytics memory.

Oracle Exalytics is an open solution for use in heterogeneous IT environments, and can access and analyze data from any Oracle or non-Oracle relational, OLAP or unstructured data sources such as IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Netezza, SAP Business Information Warehouse, and Teradata, amongst others. For organisations seeking even faster analytic performance, Oracle Exalytics features an InfiniBand connector designed to work with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Internal tests comparing Oracle Exalytics to standard BI software and off-the-shelf hardware show relational OLAP (ROLAP) reporting and dashboard performance improvements of up to 20X, and multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) modelling performance gains of up to 79X. The dramatic gains in multidimensional performance are achieved with the storage of Oracle Essbase cubes in-memory.

All horizontal and vertical industry Oracle BI Applications, which are based on the Oracle BI Foundation, also take advantage of these performance improvements. Organisations can also extend the performance and interactive visualization delivered by Oracle Exalytics directly to the iPad and iPhone for thousands of BI users on the go.

Oracle Hyperion Planning customers can now plan and forecast with increased frequency, and run more granular plans for more accurate planning cycles with the new engineered system. Beyond existing applications, Oracle Exalytics will spur new types of analytic applications not feasible using conventional BI solutions.

"The high performance delivered by the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence and Oracle Exadata machines will allow our customers in the automotive industry to fluidly interact with our data by providing response times that will not impede the analytic process", stated Kelly Garcia, vice president of Production and Business Intelligence Technologies, Polk. "The new Trellis charts will enable us to present massive amounts of data to our customers on a single page. That will allow them to see performance across all of their segments at once, quickly identify segments that are up or down and drill into the details behind that performance."

"We are very impressed with the advanced analytics and interactivity enabled by Oracle Exalytics", stated John Hood, vice president and Chief Information Officer, Key Energy Services. "We're able to rapidly slice and dice information all the way from the highest levels to the detailed level. The interactivity of the Oracle Exalytics user interface will drive up the usage of BI, and enable our users to get in and quickly find the information that they need to make impactful changes within their business."