In earlier releases, Exadata Cells did not directly communicate to each other. Any data movement between the cells was done through the database servers. Data was read from a source cell into database server memory, and then written out to the destination cell. Starting with Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software 12c Release 1 (12.1), database server processes can offload data transfer to cells. A database server instructs the destination cell to read the data directly from the source cell, and write the data to its local storage. This reduces the amount of data transferred across the fabric by half, reducing InfiniBand bandwidth consumption, and memory requirements on the database server. Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) resynchronization, resilver, and rebalance use this feature to offload data movement. This provides improved bandwidth utilization at the InfiniBand fabric level in Oracle ASM instances. No configuration is needed to utilize this feature.

Minimum software: Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) or later, and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software 12c Release 1 (12.1) or later.