Oracle Corp, the third largest software maker, announced yesterday its first hardware product, developed in collaboration with one of the worldwide leading system vendors, HP. Oracle's Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison, introduced the new HP Oracle Database Machine in a keynote addressed to nearly 43,000 OpenWorld attendees.

 

“Conventional storage arrays simply cannot compete with the Oracle-HP Database Machine,” said Larry Ellison at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

 

The two companies, HP and Oracle, have teamed up several times before, in order to provide solutions for the increasingly growing amount of digital data that current machines have to handle. The latest offering that emerged out of yet another collaboration between the two, the Oracle Exadata Storage Server, has been designed to break performance bottlenecks that surface between database servers and conventional storage, by shipping less data through larger pipes. In addition, Oracle has announced that no changes are required to the existing queries in business intelligence applications.

 

“For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is ten times faster,” Ellison further explained.

 

The Oracle Exadata product family consists of two components, namely the HP Oracle Database Machine and the HP Oracle Exadata Storage servers, which, when coupled together, are said to improve storage solutions for business users. The HP Oracle Database Machine is a high-performance system that features 64 Intel processor cores, an Oracle Enterprise Linux and a grid of 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers that can provide a maximum of 168 terabytes of raw storage with a 14GB/s data bandwidth. The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server uses a massively parallel architecture that can speed up Oracle data warehouses.

 

Up to a point, Oracle's new solution is similar to some of Apple's products, in the sense of having coupled together a software solution with a hardware platform to deliver an optimum product. The HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers are available as of today, while complete configurations can be ordered from Oracle.