Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the company's entrance into the hardware arena, with the release of two products, at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, in San Francisco, this week.
Ellison said the Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the Database Machine were built in conjunction with HP, and aim to address the data bandwidth problem companies experience today.
He added that the products have taken decades of research and over three years to develop. "A customer testing programme began in October 2007, and all customers who tested the products found them between 10 times and 50 times faster than their existing solutions. Conventional disk arrays cannot compete, he noted.
"Large data warehouses are growing rapidly, tripling in size every two years. This creates fundamental problems, as disk storage available today cannot cope, creating - in turn - a data bandwidth problem. They can store data, but cannot move the data into the servers fast enough. Data warehouses start to slow down at 1TB. Even the fastest data storage systems fall apart at about 10TB."
He noted there are two ways to solve the data bandwidth problem - reduce data going through the pipes, or have wider pipes and more of them. According to him, each server adds storage data bandwidth and processing, solving the bandwidth problem.
Ellison said the HP Oracle Database Machine is pre-configured for performance, pre-tuned and certified for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition tools and Oracle Real Application Clusters.
The HP Oracle Database Machine is a high-performance system configured for data warehousing that includes a grid of eight database servers featuring 64 Intel processor cores, and Oracle Enterprise Linux; and a grid of 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, that include up to 168TB of raw storage; and 14GBps data bandwidth to the database servers.
He explained that the Exadata Storage Servers are key performance enablers for the database machine and can be ordered separately if customers have an existing data warehouse and need the storage enhancements only.
Customers can build data warehousing solutions using Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, which feature industry-standard components including two Intel processors, up to 12TB of raw storage and InfiniBand connectivity delivering 1GBps of data bandwidth per storage server.
Ellison added that the embedded intelligence reduces data going through the pipes, allowing the hardware to return query results not disk blocks.
Mark Hurd, chairman and CEO of HP, concluded: "This is what customers want; it is a great thing for HP, Oracle and our customers. We will continue to innovate around these solutions."
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