I am currently working with a customer that is close to outgrowing their Exadata X2-2 half rack in both compute and storage capacity.  The platform is used for one of their larger data warehouse applications and the move to Exadata almost two years ago has been a resounding success, forcing them to grow the platform sooner than anticipated.

At a recent planning meeting, we started looking at the options for expansion and have developed five alternatives, all of which meet or exceed their growth requirements, yet have different pros and cons in terms of the impact to their production and test environments.

The options include an in-rack upgrade to a full rack of Exadata using the recently released X3-2 platform (an option that even applies to an older V2 rack), multi-rack cabling the existing X2-2 to another full rack or half rack X2-2 (and utilizing both compute and storage capacity in the other rack), or simply adding a new X3-2 half rack (and taking advantage of the added compute and flash performance in the X3-2).

While the decision is yet to be made, it had me thinking that one of the benefits of Exadata over a traditional database deployment is that when the time comes to expand the platform, there are a myriad of options.