TechPulse 360

HP Oracle Database Machine

For more than a decade, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has flirted with the idea of entering the hardware business. Remember the network computer, or the database device he once planned to flummox Bill Gates?

The flirtation is over. The database giant announced Wednesday the delivery of two dedicated data devices – and budding competition with vendors such as Teradata, Netezza, Sun Microsystems and storage titan EMC.

Taking the stage of the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Ellison said he got the “radical” idea for the devices while on his trimaran sailboat (a radical design of its own and one he hopes will be allowed to compete in the America’s Cup).

“It’s really extreme engineering,” the unpredictable Ellison said of both initiatives.

The push into hardware is in part sparked by a coming crisis Ellison says many big corporations will face: “There’s a huge data bandwidth problem.” The problem comes as the amount of information in existence spirals to extraordinary heights and databases a monstrous 200 terabytes or so in size can’t access data from storage farms fast enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle (credit: wicho)

The database giant chose its Oracle OpenWorld to introduce its Exadata Performance Storage Server, a device to speed up the flow of data between disk storage equipment and a company’s datbase server. It also said it would provide a high-performance database server to run its own software in partnershhip with Hewlett-Packard.

“There is a huge data bandwidth problem” the company is trying to solve, said CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday, referring to the Exadata product.

The aim is to better manage the data flow.

Ellison said his database machine would be the world’s fastest database server. “We’re not talking about the iPod Nano here,” he said. The machine uses 64 Intel processor cores to run the database and another 112 cores to store data.