Elastic Storage Expansion now available on Gen2 Exadata Cloud@Customer

We are pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) of Elastic Storage Expansion on Gen 2 Exadata Cloud@Customer. Previously, Exadata Cloud@Customer customers provisioned Exadata Infrastructure with a fixed number of storage servers determined by the shape selected during initial infrastructure deployment. With this release, you can dynamically increase the shared Exadata storage capacity of the infrastructure to meet your business needs by adding storage servers on-demand.

Key Customer Benefits

With the elastic storage expansion capability, you can now

1. Provision new Exadata Infrastructure with custom storage capacity best suited for your business needs without being constrained by the standard supported shapes

2. Start with a smaller storage footprint for the Exadata Infrastructure at install time, thereby saving cost and planning overhead to accommodate for maximum future usage upfront 

3. Expand the storage capacity on existing deployed Exadata Infrastructure on-demand in an automated, elastic fashion without any disruption to current running workloads

4. Allocate additional storage capacity available from newly added storage servers to already deployed VM Clusters and/or use them for provisioning new VM Clusters on the infrastructure

Adding new storage servers to an existing Exadata Infrastructure follows the same overall customer experience and ordering process outlined while setting up a new infrastructure deployment. Once the order for additional storage servers is processed, Oracle will work with you to deploy, activate and add storage capacity from the new servers to your Exadata Infrastructure. For new Exadata Infrastructure deployments, any additional storage servers ordered along with the infrastructure will automatically be included and made available as part of the infrastructure activation process. Exadata Infrastructures deployed with additional storage servers will be configured as an Elastic shape. The total number of storage servers and usable capacity is clearly called out for the given infrastructure.

OCI Console Experience

We will go over the following core user journey highlights for elastic storage expansion using the OCI console

◉ Scale Exadata Infrastructure to Add Storage Capacity

◉ Scale VM Cluster to Use Additional Storage Capacity

◉ Create Exadata Infrastructure with Additional Storage Servers

1. Scale Exadata Infrastructure to Add Storage Capacity

From the Exadata Infrastructure details page, you can initiate a request to scale your infrastructure with additional storage server(s). Before initiating this request from the OCI console, you should order the additional storage servers planned for elastic expansion.

You can specify the number of storage servers to add as part of the scale infrastructure request. The additional storage capacity, current storage capacity, and total storage capacity are clearly called out as part of the scale request.

Once the scale infrastructure request has been completed, you can download the generated configuration bundle and provide it to the Oracle field engineer while coordinating the delivery, deployment, and activation of the additional storage server(s) in your data center.

Oracle field engineering team will work with you to ensure that the requested number of additional storage server(s) are deployed as part of Exadata Infrastructure for which the scale request was initiated. After deploying the additional storage server(s), Oracle will provide a configuration file to upload and activate the new server(s).

After the new storage servers are activated, you can add the storage capacity from the newly added servers to the total usable Shared Exadata Storage capacity and make it available for VM Clusters to allocate and consume. 

Adding storage capacity to the infrastructure's shared Exadata Storage capacity free pool triggers an ASM rebalance of existing disk groups (used by the provisioned VM Clusters) to all storage servers visible to the infrastructure, including the newly added ones.

Note: While rebalance is in progress, you may see some performance impact depending on how much capacity is already in use by the existing disk groups.

After completing all these steps for elastic storage expansion, you can view the total number of storage servers and the total Exadata Shared Storage capacity on the infrastructure details page.

2. Scale VM Cluster to Use Additional Storage Capacity

As part of the VM Cluster scale workflow, you can allocate and use the additional storage capacity from the newly added storage server(s). The new maximum limit for shared storage capacity is reflected and used for validation.

Note: The additional storage capacity from the newly added storage server(s) is also presented and available as part of the workflow to create new VM Clusters.

 

3. Create Exadata Infrastructure with Additional Storage Servers

While provisioning a new Exadata Infrastructure, you can choose the number of storage servers to be included and deployed as part of the initial infrastructure creation workflow. The total storage capacity from all the storage servers that are part of initial infrastructure deployment is clearly called out.

Source: oracle.com