Exadata Re-Racking Service

I’ve heard from a few sources now that Oracle is offering a new Exadata Re-racking service for quarter and half racks. The idea, as I understand it, is that if you have your own rack equipment in your data centre and don’t want to use the rack that Exadata comes preinstalled in, you can pay an extra fee for Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services engineers (a fine bunch of people I must say!) to re-rack it. It appears that the machine is delivered to your data centre and then ACS will disassemble it at your site and reassemble it in your rack.

There appear to be some caveats, such as a pre-installation survey to check that your rack kit is suitable and a ban on putting anything else in the same rack. Also, since you cannot have this with the full rack I presume that this would preclude you from upgrading to a full machine in the future – at least not without having to relocate the kit, which I guess means downtime. I must stress that I don’t have the exact details, so talk to your friendly local Exadata sales rep if you want to know.

What I will say is that in all my time at Oracle the idea that customers could not re-rack the Exadata component servers was one of the few rules which was set in stone. Many customers asked, but all were told no. So what’s changed?

If you ask Oracle I am sure they would say that they are “listening to customer demand” and being “flexible”. On the other hand surely there must be some who will see this as a simple case of abandoning a principle in order to increase the attraction of Exadata and get more sales.

I’d love to know what happens to the empty Exadata rack once the kit has been moved. I’ll start checking to see if they appear on eBay…