Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 – A Powerful Private Cloud Platform for Enterprises

As enterprises continue to demand higher levels of performance, stronger security, and greater control over their data, deploying cloud models on-premises has become an inevitable trend. Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 (PCA X10) is designed to address this need—bringing the full Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) experience directly into the customer’s data center.

 Overview of Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 is a rack-scale engineered system that integrates compute, storage, and networking based on OCI standards, enabling rapid deployment of cloud-native applications on-premises.

Key highlights of PCA X10 include:

• Deploying a cloud environment independent of public cloud (OCI disconnected)
• Developing applications once and deploying flexibly on-premises or in the cloud
• Tight integration with systems such as Exadata or Oracle Database Appliance

This enables enterprises to leverage cloud benefits while ensuring data residency and strict security requirements.

 Overall Architecture – Designed for Performance and High Availability

PCA X10 is designed with an architecture similar to OCI, including:

• 3 Fault Domains (FD) to enhance fault tolerance
• No Single Point of Failure (SPOF)
• Separation of management resources and workload resources

Additionally, the system supports up to 8 independent tenancies, allowing resource isolation across departments or environments (Dev/Test/Prod).

 Main Hardware Components of PCA X10

A standard PCA X10 system includes:

• 3 Management Nodes
• Minimum of 3 Compute Nodes
• 2 Oracle ZFS ZS9-2 storage heads
• Storage trays (capacity/performance)
• 4 x 100GbE switches + 1 management switch

There is also a Flex Bays option, allowing flexible expansion of up to 2 compute nodes, 2 SSD trays, or 1 HDD tray.

 Management Nodes – The Control Core of the System

The management software of Private Cloud Appliance, known as the “Service Enclave,” includes the control plane and controller software running on three dedicated management nodes. A key design principle of PCA X10 is the isolation between system resources and customer resources.

Separating management nodes from customer compute nodes enhances stability and security, while ensuring that customer workloads and infrastructure processes do not compete for resources. This also enables predictable and repeatable performance for customer workloads.

The management nodes are configured as a cluster to provide high availability and support zero-downtime rolling upgrades. Since all management nodes are identical, each node can take over different management functions and continue operating even if one node is unavailable due to maintenance or failure.

 Compute Nodes – High-Performance Processing Power

Compute nodes provide the processing capacity to run compute instances (virtual machines) and are referred to as the “Compute Enclave.” PCA X10 is configured with 3 to 12 compute nodes, powered by 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors, delivering up to 184 OCPUs per node.

Customers can scale from 552 OCPUs to 2208 OCPUs within a single rack, and up to 6624 OCPUs in a multi-rack configuration.

A key design feature is the automatic configuration of compute nodes, reducing operational effort and accelerating time-to-value. Each compute node is automatically assigned to one of three Fault Domains (FD) to enhance application resilience.

The system supports zero-downtime rolling upgrades for compute nodes, provided sufficient spare capacity is available. Application instances are temporarily migrated away from nodes in maintenance mode and moved back once maintenance is completed.

Compute nodes run the KVM hypervisor, and each instance is allocated dedicated RAM and OCPUs, preventing “noisy neighbor” effects that could impact performance.

 Storage – Flexible Between Capacity and Performance

The primary storage resource is the Oracle ZS9-2 Storage Appliance, a high-performance storage system built on the ZFS product line, offering multi-protocol access in a highly available cluster.

ZS9-2 capacity is used for object storage, virtual machine images, and customer block storage. It also supports built-in features such as replication, cloning, and encryption.

The ZS9-2 system includes two controllers, each equipped with dual 24-core Intel Xeon processors and 1TB of RAM. Like management and compute nodes, it uses clustering to eliminate single points of failure and enable zero-downtime maintenance and upgrades.

The default storage configuration includes a single HDD tray, providing over 150TB of usable capacity after mirroring, checksum, and RAID overhead. A PCA system can support 1 to 20 high-capacity storage trays, each with 20 x 22TB drives in RAID configuration, along with SSD-based read/write cache accelerators. Total storage can scale beyond 3.65PB.

Optionally, 1 to 20 high-performance SSD trays can be configured, each with 20 x 7.68TB SAS SSDs and 2 write accelerators. These storage tiers (capacity and performance) can be combined to optimize total capacity and IOPS performance.

Additionally, each compute node includes local SATA disks for boot, while management nodes use NVMe SSDs.

 Networking – High Performance with Cloud-Native Design

The network architecture of PCA X10 is based on OCI networking services. L3 networks, Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs), and subnets run on high-speed physical infrastructure with separate data plane and management networks. Like compute and storage, networking follows principles of isolation and physical redundancy.

The data plane is built on redundant 100Gbps switches in a two-layer design similar to a leaf-spine topology. Leaf switches connect rack components, while spine switches form the backbone and provide connectivity to external networks. Each leaf switch connects to all spine switches, which are also interconnected.

This topology provides high resiliency, scalability, and optimized traffic paths.

PCA X10 delivers comprehensive networking services, including:

• L2/L3 virtual networking
• IPv4
• Load balancing
• Firewall
• NAT
• DHCP and DNS
• Local peering
• Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG – virtual router)
• Security Lists and Security Groups

North-South traffic uses OVN Distributed Gateways to route traffic from overlay networks (VCNs) to the underlay network and then through spine switch uplinks to the data center. Internal East-West traffic is tunneled over a single underlay network.

 Conclusion

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 is an ideal solution for enterprises that want to:

• Deploy cloud on-premises
• Ensure data security and compliance
• Leverage OCI capabilities without requiring internet connectivity

With its modern architecture, flexible scalability, and high performance, PCA X10 is not just infrastructure—it is a complete cloud platform within your data center.

References:

· Oracle datasheet. (2024) .“Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10 Datasheet”

https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/private-cloud-appliance-x10-datasheet.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

· Oracle blog. (2023). Saurabh Baijal và Tanmay Dhuri - “Announcing Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X10”

https://blogs.oracle.com/oracle-systems/announcing-oracle-private-cloud-appliance-x10