Infinio is VMware Caching Software, from Ignite Technologies. Infinio is designed to deliver lightning-fast I/O for any storage — for the world's fastest VMs.
N/A
Oracle Exalogic
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle's Exalogic is a converged infrastructure appliance.
Infinio is best suited for infrastructure that has high-latency read IO performance challenges. It does nothing to help write IO, so keep in mind the type of workload for which you need to reduce latency. If you have traditional SAS or SATA storage, Infinio has a tremendous impact on the response time of many applications. You can build your cluster's caching pool from either available RAM or an internal drive inside each host. This flexibility helps Infinio to be suitable across many types of environments.
Oracle Exalogic in conjunction with an Oracle Exadata based platform is what I would consider the best of breed solution; however the performance may be overkill for what you need. Don't spend the money unless you need the performance, Oracle offers other solutions at a much lower cost. Purchase what you need not what's the shiny new product.
Private Cloud: in the virtual configuration, you can create several accounts and assign different resources (vCPU, RAM, etc.) to several departments in your organization.
SDP & Infiband: Oracle Exalogic can be connected to Oracle Exadata using Infiniband Fabric, to take advantage of high bandwidth and low latency network to connect Weblogic to Oracle Database.
Standardization: Oracle Weblogic Server running on Oracle Exalogic is the same software running on a normal Linux machine, so you can easily move Java applications without changing it, and immediately benefit from the Exalogic Optimizations.
Currently, the management of Exalogic is a little arcane. There is a good chance that Oracle can bring flexibility into the control stack because we have seen changes with each version of the software Echo was an improvement and foxtrot even more so. The ability to easily change VM shapes was another welcome change.
Again the fact arises that to build a very high performance machine there will be idiosyncrasies and a certain amount of retraining may be required. I think this is one area where Exalogic lacks not as a product but as a solution is that there isn't as much good knowledge available about it as there is for other engineered systems.
The Exalogic default setup could do with an SSD storage option, currently the onboard comes with a spinning disk.
Support has always been helpful and responsive. Upgrades can be guided and scheduled so you can be confident that things will go smoothly. The product issues have been minimal and the support team has always done a great job at getting back to me with the recommended fixes that solved my problems.
It is a very condensed version of what used to be rows of servers. I like that storage, networking and compute nodes fit in one rack. The power and the software are top notch. The only problem is cost. You need to do some serious processing to get the true value out of the Exalogic system.
Infinio has no real market competition. There was a tool called Pernix FVP that did both read/write acceleration that I evaluated that became end-of-life while it was in POC. It was more complicated to deploy and remove than Infinio and required downtime for each host. Also, the fact that it was no longer supported made the decision to choose Infinio easy.
It's hard to compare Oracle Exalogic Engineered Systems with anything else on the market. It's so purpose built for application performance and intended to be used in conjunction with other Oracle Engineered Systems. As I alluded to earlier in this review the cost may not be worth the investment if the performance isn't needed. Oracle offers other solutions like the Oracle PCA which will meet the need for licensing compliance at a much lower cost of ownership and may fit better into your current infrastructure.
