Gavin Parish and Gurmeet Goindi joined Cris Pedregal and several dozen attendees for an informal chat about all matters related to Exadata hardware. The topics covered in the office hours are below -- so you can listen to this as a podcast as well, as most of the content is accessible without the visual aids.

03:07 How Exadata teams decides what goes into each release
05:21 Exadata X8 hardware overview
08:22 Why and when does a hardware component remain the same on a new Exadata release?
10:51 What’s the overhead of running a database with TDE compared to non-encrypted on Exadata X8-2?
12:28 X8 gives you 60% more performance and 40% higher capacity at the same price of X7
13:10 Overview of the new Exadata Storage Server X8-2 Extended (XT)
13:52 Why did Oracle create XT, a low cost Exadata Storage Server?
15:58 How did Oracle lower the costs for the Storage Server?
18:09 Exadata Storage Server X8-2 Extended (XT) manageability benefits
19:05 XT Performance
21:14 XT and backups
22:31 Exadata Storage Server X8-2 Extended (XT)
23:52 XT use in practice
24:54 10 years of Exadata hardware
31:10 Exadata components: how are they chosen for each generation?
32:45 Exadata components: the NVMe example
34:08 Exadata components: what about GPUs?
36:51 Exadata use of Oracle Enterprise Linux 6 versus OEL 7
40:14 Exadata X8-2 compared to Exadata X8-8
41:47 Exadata X8-8 signals Oracle commitment to technology leadership
43:08 Exadata is a foundational technology
44:16 Autonomous Database technology and Exadata