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.
The HP Oracle Database Machines is designed to host a high-performance Oracle database and will be what the company says is the world’s fastest database server.
“We’re not talking about the iPod Nano here,” Ellison said during an uncharacteristically brief address. The machine, available immediately, uses 64 Intel processing cores to run the database and another 112 cores to store data. It costs $650,000 and requires a $1.68 million software license, unless a customer already has such a license.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, appearing at the event by video conference, said HP would support the device.
The Exadata Performance Storage Server is a aimed at speeding up the flow of data between disk storage arrays and a database in big data warehouses, the intersection where Ellison sees the “huge data bandwidth problem” in the making as a volume of data on the Internet increases.
The server is designed to ease that flow by reducing the amount of data flowing between the equipment. It is available immediately to run with Oracle’s Linux database. Versions for other Oracle databases are underway.
