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Oracle Exalytics BI In-Memory Machine Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) [ID 1435778.1]
Modified: 08-Feb-2013 Type: FAQ Status: PUBLISHED [ EXTERNAL ] Priority: 2

In this Document Purpose Questions and Answers Overview: 1. What is Oracle Exalytics? 2. Is Oracle Exalytics compatible with Oracle Exadata? 3. What are the key technologies behind Exalytics? 4. Is there any functional difference between Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite components on Exalytics and Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite licensed separately? 5. Will Hyperion Planning or Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) run on Exalytics? 6. Can the "Plus" components (Interactive Reporting, Web Analysis, SQR, Financial Reporting) of OBIEE Plus run on Exalytics? 7. Is there any functional limitation in Essbase running on Exalytics? Are all of the Essbase capabilities also available in Essbase on Exalytics? 8. What enhancements have been made to the OBIEE end user interface to take advantage of all of the performance gains of Exalytics? 9. How does Exalytics help mobile Business Intelligence? Software Technology and Configuration: 1. Exadata has not been deployed. Can benefits be obtained from Exalytics? 2. Will Exalytics run with Oracle Databases on other server platforms? 3. There is no Oracle database deployed. Can benefits be driven from Exalytics? 4. Exadata is already installed, is Exalytics needed? 5. How is Exalytics optimized for Exadata? 6. Exalogic is already installed, what would be the need for Exalytics? 7. Can the Exalytics software be installed manually (BI Foundation, TimesTen) on a non-Exalytics machine and experience the same performance boosts? 8. Is it possible to set up virtualized environments in an Exalytics machine? 9. Which version of Weblogic is bundled with Exalytics? 10. Can an existing OBIEE, Times Ten or Essbase license be transferred to Exalytics? 11. Is all of the required software pre-installed on the Exalytics machine? 12. Can other software be run on Exalytics? 13. Can Exalytics be configured with Weblogic/web servers located outside of Exalytics machine? 14. Do Essbase service components (EAS, APS, Essbase Studio etc.) need to be installed on Exalytics, or can they be installed on a separate machine? 15. Is it possible to leverage Weblogic Enterprise Edition for clustering? If yes, how can it be configured? Hardware Specifications and Configuration: 1. What are the hardware configurations supported by Exalytics? 2. Will customization or after-market modification of the Exalytics machine be possible? 3. What processor architecture does Exalytics use? 4. What network interfaces does Exalytics provide?
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5. Can more than one Exalytics machine be used for a single BI application? 6. Can Exalytics be mounted in the same rack as Exadata? 7. What storage options are available for Exalytics? 8. How is the local storage allocated? 9. How is the machine sized? How many cores, memory and storage is needed? 10. Can NIC cards be added to an existing Exalytics server? In-Memory Features and Optimizations: 1. What in-memory technologies are available in Exalytics? 2. What is TimesTen? 3. Can the Times Ten environment be monitored in the Enterprise Manager? 4. What workloads is TimesTen designed for? 5. What are the compression ratios for the columnar compression in TimesTen? 6. How is the In-Memory cache populated? 7. Will the Adaptive In-Memory Cache be available for deployment without Exalytics? 8. How frequently is the Adaptive In-Memory Cache refreshed? 9. Does the entire In-Memory database need to be refreshed, or can only certain aggregates be refreshed? 10. Is it necessary to use the Adaptive In-Memory cache? Can data be chosen to be put into TimesTen and load it via the TimesTen load utilities? 11. OBI already has a caching mechanism in presentation layer and BI server layer. How is the new inmemory caching better for performance? 12. Does the Summary Advisor look at Essbase usage in determining aggregate data for TimesTen? 13. How has OBIEE been enhanced to take advantage of the Exalytics machine? 14. How has Essbase been enhanced to take advantage of the Exalytics machine? 15. How does Exalytics help Business Intelligence Applications? 16. How does Exalytics help EPM Application deployments? References

Applies to:
Hyperion Essbase - Version 11.1.2.2.000 to 11.1.2.2.000 [Release 11.1] Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition - Version 11.1.1.6.0 to 11.1.1.6.5 [Release 11g] Oracle Exalytics Software - Version 1.0.0.0.0 to 1.0.0.2.0 [Release 1.0] TimesTen Data Server - Version 11.2.2.2.0 to 11.2.2.4.0 [Release 11.2] Information in this document applies to any platform.

Purpose
The purpose of this document is to answer common and frequently asked questions regarding Oracle Exalytics, BI InMemory Machine.

Questions and Answers Overview:

1. What is Oracle Exalytics?
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Exalytics is an engineered solution that includes a memory-centric hardware platform, proven in memory technology from Oracle TimesTen and the breadth of Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite functionality. 2. Is Oracle Exalytics compatible with Oracle Exadata? Exalytics is specifically engineered to work best with Exadata. Exalytics provides "speed of thought" interactivity whereas Exadata provides the fastest enterprise data warehouse and transaction platform. 3. What are the key technologies behind Exalytics? The key components of Exalytics are: Hardware designed for in-memory processing and optimized for Exadata In-Memory Analytics: The in-memory analytics consists of the TimesTen In-memory technology, In-memory enhancements for Essbase (MOLAP) and In-memory optimizations for BI and EPM applications. The In-memory analytics powers the sub-second responsiveness required for advanced visualizations. Advanced visualizations: Oracle BI Presentation Services now provides highly interactive visualizations, data exploration and high-density visualizations. Adaptive In-memory cache: The Adaptive In-Memory Cache consists of software that adaptively tunes the inmemory cache based on usage. 4. Is there any functional difference between Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite components on Exalytics and Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite licensed separately? Functionally, the Adaptive In-memory cache is only available on Exalytics. Beyond this, numerous machine-specific performance/scalability optimizations are available and licensed only in the Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation running on Exalytics. 5. Will Hyperion Planning or Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) run on Exalytics? Planning will run on Exalytics in version 1.0.0.1. HPCM will not run on the Exalytics platform but can access Essbase cubes running on Exalytics for superior performance benefits. Currently HPCM is in the certification process. The following products are certified to run on Exalytics: * * * * * * * * * * Essbase Server Oracle HTTP Server Provider Services Calculation Manager Essbase Administration Server Shared Services EPM Workspace Planning Financial Reporting Web Analysis

6. Can the "Plus" components (Interactive Reporting, Web Analysis, SQR, Financial Reporting) of OBIEE Plus run on Exalytics? No, these components are not supported on an Exalytics machine. These components will need to be deployed on a separate server. The components of OBIEE that run on Exalytics are OBIEE, BI Publisher, and Answers. 7. Is there any functional limitation in Essbase running on Exalytics? Are all of the Essbase capabilities also available in Essbase on Exalytics?
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There are no functional limitations for Essbase running on Exalytics. All Essbase features and functions are available on Exalytics. 8. What enhancements have been made to the OBIEE end user interface to take advantage of all of the performance gains of Exalytics? A new user experience is available for OBIEE 11.1.1.6. While many of these features are available with standard OBIEE 11.1.1.6, dramatically faster response time enabled by Exalytics allows for: Highly interactive analysis: Dimension browsing, go-less prompts, auto complete, search, partial refreshes etc. that make dashboards inviting and usable. Free-form data exploration: Contextual operations, master-detail linking, display suggestions allow a BI user to explore and discover data that could not be easily done before. High density visualizations: High density visualizations like micro charts, trellis, etc. allow quick and intuitive navigation of large amount of data. Though all visualization enhancements are licensed as a part of the software offering, the visualization depends on certain response time guarantees that may be unsuitable for most non-Exalytics deployment. Exalytics is the most costeffective way to achieve the performance required for the visualization features. 9. How does Exalytics help mobile Business Intelligence? All the visualization improvements will be directly available for the mobile interface. In addition, the increased scalability provided by Exalytics will enable smooth scaling as the BI usage increases with increased mobile adoption without additional investment.

Software Technology and Configuration:

1. Exadata has not been deployed. Can benefits be obtained from Exalytics? The diversity of data sources has always been a strength of Oracle Business Intelligence. Exalytics supports the same data sources that are supported by Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite; including DW solutions, OLAP, MOLAP, OLTP solutions, and mixed workloads. Exalytics excels in providing "speed of thought" interactivity and related benefits on a semantic layer across data sources with varied performance characteristics. Exalytics is the ideal solution to provide the benefits of In-Memory Business Intelligence with and without Exadata. 2. Will Exalytics run with Oracle Databases on other server platforms? Yes, the Exalytics solution leverages the Common Enterprise Information model of the BI Server to connect to Oracle Databases running on other server platforms. The Exalytics solution is server agnostic when connecting to database server platforms running an Oracle Database. 3. There is no Oracle database deployed. Can benefits be driven from Exalytics? Yes, Exalytics supports all the data sources supported by Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, including DB2, Teradata, SQL Server, Essbase, MS Analysis Services, and Netezza. Exalytics provides the benefits of In-Memory Business Intelligence with, and without, an Oracle database. 4. Exadata is already installed, is Exalytics needed? Exadata provides the fastest and the most cost effective data warehouse and transactional database infrastructure.
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Exalytics provides the fastest and most interactive Business Intelligence (reporting and analysis) experience across all data sources including Exadata. Exalytics has been specifically engineered to optimally leverage Exadata to provide subsecond interactivity at the enterprise scale. Exalytics also optimally configures the cache to provide consistent responsiveness across data sources with varied performance characteristics. 5. How is Exalytics optimized for Exadata? The combined Exalytics and Exadata solution provides the industry's best data warehousing and Business Intelligence solution in terms of performance, scalability, and low total cost of ownership. The Exalytics solution contains an Exadata BI connector that includes an optimized, high-speed InfiniBand connection that enables faster cache loads, faster queries. The Adaptive In-Memory Cache within Exalytics will optimally distribute cache-able data between Exadata and TimesTen for maximum performance. 6. Exalogic is already installed, what would be the need for Exalytics? Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the best foundation for applications hardware and software engineered together to provide extreme performance for Java applications, Oracle Applications, and all other enterprise applications. It is a tremendous platform for application consolidation and cloud computing. Exalytics is best for a high performing, scalable analytic workload like Financial and operational planning or "speed of thought" analysis. 7. Can the Exalytics software be installed manually (BI Foundation, TimesTen) on a non-Exalytics machine and experience the same performance boosts? No, the Exalytics software has been updated with code optimizations that take advantage of the exact configuration of the Exalytics machine. Benefits of the memory and aggregate optimization that are provided by the summary advisor would be lost. The summary advisor is only available on an Exalytics machine. 8. Is it possible to set up virtualized environments in an Exalytics machine? With the Exalytics PS1 Patch (1.0.0.1), it is possible to set up virtualization on an Exalytics server. Please see Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation and Administration Guide for Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine Exalytics X2-4 Release 1 (1.0), Section 2 Configuring Exalytics Machines for Virtualization. 9. Which version of Weblogic is bundled with Exalytics? BI Foundation 11.1.1.6 includes WebLogic Server 10.3.6. 10. Can an existing OBIEE, Times Ten or Essbase license be transferred to Exalytics? Please contact your Oracle sales representative for complete and current licensing information. 11. Is all of the required software pre-installed on the Exalytics machine? The Exalytics hardware is shipped with the Exalytics base image that consists of the operating system, optimized kernel, and device drivers pre-configured. The hardware is installed by Oracle as a service and brought to a lights on, network connected state. The deployment of the BI foundation and in-memory database is done at the customer site. Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) and Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) provide services from hardware installation to software installation and configuration.

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12. Can other software be run on Exalytics? Other software can be installed, such as agents for monitoring or backups. However, in general customers are encouraged NOT to deploy any other software on the Exalytics solution. Oracle will not guarantee that the configuration will function correctly. Nor will Oracle guarantee that the overall reliability or performance of Exalytics will be unaffected. Exalytics is specifically designed to perform optimally when used in the manner for which it was designed. 13. Can Exalytics be configured with Weblogic/web servers located outside of Exalytics machine? WebLogic is embedded in BI Foundation Suite. Exalytics cannot be configured with web servers located outside the machine. 14. Do Essbase service components (EAS, APS, Essbase Studio etc.) need to be installed on Exalytics, or can they be installed on a separate machine? On Exalytics version 1.0.0.1, the Oracle Essbase server must be installed. The following Essbase components can be installed on the Exalytics machine if desired, Oracle HTTP Server, Hyperion Provider Services, Hyperion Calculation Manager, Hyperion Essbase Administration Server (EAS), Hyperion Shared Services, Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Workspace, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Reporting and Hyperion Web Analysis. On Exalytics version 1.0.0.0 the Essbase server only can be installed, all other Hyperions components should not. Essbase Studio is not recommended for installation on an Exalytics server in either version. 15. Is it possible to leverage Weblogic Enterprise Edition for clustering? If yes, how can it be configured? It is possible to leverage EE clustering across multiple Exalytics machines. This would require Weblogic Enterprise Edition to be running on the Exalytics machine. Exalogic provides a scalable application platform and can leverage Exalytics BI.

Hardware Specifications and Configuration:

1. What are the hardware configurations supported by Exalytics? Exalytics is available in a single hardware configuration that is a four-socket multi-processor server with each processor providing 10 compute cores with 2 hyperthreads each providing a total of 40 cores and 80 hyperthreads. Exalytics comes with 1TB of DRAM and 3.6TB of raw direct attached storage. High speed network interfaces are available including InfiniBand and 10GbE. 2. Will customization or after-market modification of the Exalytics machine be possible? No. The Exalytics hardware is a carefully balanced, tuned and tested system. It will not be possible to alter the configurations, or substitute components, except through a formal field upgrade performed by Oracle. This includes adding or removing memory, changing disks, adding or removing PCIe cards. Any such changes will make the hardware unsupported. 3. What processor architecture does Exalytics use? 64-bit x86 (Intel) 4. What network interfaces does Exalytics provide?
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The following network interfaces are available with Exalytics: 2 port InfiniBand specifically for Exadata connectivity. 2 port 10G Ethernet (SFP+) 4 port 1G Ethernet 5. Can more than one Exalytics machine be used for a single BI application? Any number of Exalytics machines can be clustered by providing the cluster interconnect networking (over 10G or InfiniBand or 1G) and a common NFS mount. When using with Exadata, up to two Exalytics can be deployed with Exadata without an external InfiniBand switch. The Exadata InfiniBand network can be leveraged both as a cluster interconnect as well as for fast database access. 6. Can Exalytics be mounted in the same rack as Exadata? Exadata does not have any rack units allocated for Exalytics and thus deployment of Exalytics on an Exadata machine is not a supported configuration. Additionally, the size dimensions and specifications of an Exalytics machine do not match those of an Exadata machine. 7. What storage options are available for Exalytics? Exalytics provides 3.6TB of raw storage configured into 3TB of usable high-speed direct attached storage. In addition, Exalytics supports NFS for customer supplied storage. A cluster configuration requires external NFS for storing the common metadata. 8. How is the local storage allocated? The following data is stored in the local storage: 1. Operating system, Oracle software binaries 2. Oracle software configuration information for BI Foundation Suite and TimesTen for Exalytics 3. Logs and checkpoints for the TimesTen for Exalytics instances (This is to provide a persistent backup for the inmemory data.) 4. Essbase data files including BSO / ASO files. The actual allocation of the local storage depends on the specific deployment configuration. 9. How is the machine sized? How many cores, memory and storage is needed? The Exalytics comes in a single hardware configuration that can support very large number of BI Users. Multiple machines can be clustered together for higher capacity or higher availability. Smaller deployments will benefit from lower license costs with the Named User Plus licensing option. 10. Can NIC cards be added to an existing Exalytics server? No. Just as it is with other Oracle engineered systems, Exalytics is sold as an appliance and all testing is done with the current configuration of cards in their specific slots.

In-Memory Features and Optimizations:

1. What in-memory technologies are available in Exalytics? Exalytics incorporates several in-memory technologies. The Adaptive In-Memory Cache is powered by the TimesTen
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In-Memory Database technology. Enhancements to Essbase provides for multidimensional analysis in memory. The BI server supports in-memory intelligent result caching. Having a large memory, high compute system enables all software to run faster and scale better. 2. What is TimesTen? TimesTen is an in-memory relational database. All data is stored in a memory-optimized format. TimesTen supports Oracle compatible SQL. In-memory storage and processing provides significantly faster query processing. TimesTen powers the Adaptive In-Memory Cache in Exalytics. 3. Can the Times Ten environment be monitored in the Enterprise Manager? Yes, TimesTen can be monitored via Enterprise Manager (EM) grid control. EM Grid control refers to the separate EM product that is used to monitor Oracle and TimesTen databases. EM Grid control may also be installed as a standalone product and it is not part of Fusion Middleware (FMW) EM. 4. What workloads is TimesTen designed for? TimesTen has always supported transactional and analytic processing. For Exalytics, TimesTen has been specifically enhanced to support SQL that enables optimal function shipping from the BI Server. These reduce the number of queries as well as minimize the overall query processing time. TimesTen also provides columnar compression that enables more data to be stored in memory without sacrificing performance. 5. What are the compression ratios for the columnar compression in TimesTen? The compression ratios will typically be in the 3x-5x range. Depending on the data, in some cases it can be as high as 10x. 6. How is the In-Memory cache populated? A summary advisor will utilize the usage statistics that are captured within OBIEE and make recommendations on what information should be aggregated. It will look at all of the performance characteristics of the query, including how much time was spent in the database vs. the BI server and the level of granularity that should be placed in-memory. Scripts will be created and executed that loads the aggregated content into memory. Administrators will be able to override the recommendations generated by the summary advisor. 7. Will the Adaptive In-Memory Cache be available for deployment without Exalytics? The Adaptive In-Memory Cache is specifically designed and optimized for the hardware-software components in Exalytics and is not supported on any other platform. 8. How frequently is the Adaptive In-Memory Cache refreshed? The Adaptive In-Memory Cache can be scheduled to be refreshed at an administrator determined frequency. 9. Does the entire In-Memory database need to be refreshed, or can only certain aggregates be refreshed? The Administrator can decide what aggregates get refreshed and which ones do not. The entire aggregate table needs to be refreshed. It is not incremental. 10. Is it necessary to use the Adaptive In-Memory cache? Can data be chosen to be put into TimesTen and load it via the TimesTen load utilities?
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No. Administrators can override the Adaptive In-Memory cache and choose specific data to be cached in TimesTen. In this case, the administrators shall have to configure the OBIEE RPD to enable proper use of the cache. 11. OBI already has a caching mechanism in presentation layer and BI server layer. How is the new in-memory caching better for performance? OBI Caching only speeds up what has been seen before. An In-memory data structure generated by the summary advisor is optimized to provide maximum value by accounting for the expected broad usage and drilldowns. It is possible to adapt the in-memory data to seasonality by running the summary advisor on specific workloads. Moreover, the in-memory data is created in an analytic database providing maximum performance for the large amount of memory available. 12. Does the Summary Advisor look at Essbase usage in determining aggregate data for TimesTen? Yes, the Summary Advisor will utilize the OBIEE usage tracking logs. Any logical query that can benefit from a performance boost, including Essbase queries, will be considered as an aggregate candidate for TimesTen. 13. How has OBIEE been enhanced to take advantage of the Exalytics machine? Apart from in-memory analytics, OBIEE on Exalytics includes machine-specific optimizations that enable OBIEE to utilize all the compute and memory available on the machine. Scalability of 3X has been demonstrated in OBIEE on high load compared to OBIEE running on the same hardware without these optimizations. 14. How has Essbase been enhanced to take advantage of the Exalytics machine? Essbase on Exalytics makes use of machine-specific optimizations that enable Essbase to utilize all the compute and memory available on the machine. Orders of magnitude of scalability and response time improvements have been seen especially for the read-write MOLAP use cases. 15. How does Exalytics help Business Intelligence Applications? Here is a list of benefits of Exalytics for Business Intelligence Applications High Performance: Better Decisions, Increased Adoption and Productivity Sub-second interactivity Free-form data exploration High density visualizations Responsive embedded BI Forward looking analytics with Essbase Simpler, Faster, Efficient Deployments Eliminate post load aggregates, tuning with Adaptive In-Memory Cache Accelerate ETL with Exadata optimizations Manage pervasive mobile adoption with unprecedented scalability All Oracle Business Intelligence applications certified day one Lower Operations Cost and Risk End-to-end standard configuration: from processors to user interface End-to-end certified configuration; single vendor accountability 16. How does Exalytics help EPM Application deployments? Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management use Essbase as a backend data source. Essbase running on Exalytics is faster and scales better. These EPM applications can leverage this speed and scalability to provide faster and highly scalable deployments that were previously not possible.
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References
NOTE:1427996.1 - Master Note For Oracle Exalytics BI In-Memory Machine

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