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.
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Oracle Exalogic
Score 9.0 out of 10
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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 was designed for Oracle WebLogic Server, the best scenario is for two specific tasks: 1) consolidation of different installations (in a virtual configuration) 2) maximize the performance of java applications (with any code change) Oracle Exalogic is not appropriate to create custom vServer. For example, it's not possibile to install Microsoft Windows operating systems. There are specific Exalogic vServer template to be used instead.
My major complaint with the Exalogic platform is in the resilience of the ZFS appliance within the platform. This device should fail-over to the redundant controller when issue occur, however we have had three events in which this did not happen and a complete outage followed.
Additionally Oracle sales has a tendency to exaggerate the simplicity of this platform. The management overhead is great, and while my company provides managed service, for our specific customer they were surprised to find out how much work goes into run-and-maintain support.
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.
