Oracle introduces Database Appliance

ITBusiness.ca.

While Oracle has the enterprise market covered with Oracle Exadata, the vendor saw an opportunity for an offering that will scale into the small and medium-sized business space. The answer is the Oracle Database Appliance, which bundles Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters software on a two-node Sun Fire server cluster running Oracle Linux.

The Oracle Database Appliance is an engineered system of software, servers, storage, and networking that offers high availability for a wide range of custom and packaged online transaction processing and data warehousing application databases, reports ChannelPro.

The Oracle Database Appliance also offers 'pay-as-you-grow' software licensing for Oracle Database and related software, from two to 24 processor cores. This enables SME customers to align their software spend with their business growth, without the need for hardware upgrades.

The fact that the machine is based on Intel's current six-core Xeon X5675 processors is a bit amusing, given that Oracle is about to launch its own eight-core Sparc T4 processor, according to ITJungle.

Despite the logical inconsistency, and perhaps the long-term prospects of an X86-based database appliance, the machine launched by Oracle last week will get some interest from Oracle channel partners that have largely been sidelined by the company since it took over Sun Microsystems in January 2010, and among SME customers that are looking to consolidate their databases onto new iron.