Today, Larry Ellison announced two new hardware products. No this is not a joke. Oracle and HP have teamed up to produce the new Exadata Programmable Storage Center (EPSC) and the new Oracle Database Machine (ODBM). After 3 years of development and a year of testing with large customers, these new products are available immediately. HP will provide hardware support and build the systems.
The EPSC is a smart storage device consisting of 2 Intel Quad Core processors, up to 12TB of disk storage and a bundling of the Oracle Database with Oracle Enterprise Linux. The EPSC can be configured with multiples of the modules. For transmitting data, each module comes with two Infiniband connectors.
Each new module adds not just more disk storage but more processors, memory, database software and bandwidth.
The Oracle Database Machine combines multiple EPSC’s into a grid machine that supports up to 8 database servers and 14 Exadata Storage Services. It comes with RAC, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and can grow (today) up to 168TB of storage. Driven by up to 64 Intel Cores, the Oracle Database Machine provides a massively parallel architecture at a much lower price point and near-linear performance as new storage is added.
List prices indicate that the pricing per Terabyte of Storage is very similiar (for the hardware) to that of most Storage Area Networks, about $4K per Terabyte. That doesn’t include database licenses so that is an unknown.
Oracle noted that this system dramatically outperforms the performance by other major competitors including EMC, and Teradata using traditional servers and Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies. It is designed to support both Data Warehouse and OLTP processing.
Incidentally, if you’re entering Triora Group’s “Oracle Open World Get Me Some Bling!” contest, I’ve highlighted the answer to today’s question. Just click on the answer, and you’ll be taken to the questionnaire.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Ed Reed // Sep 25, 2008 at 7:34 am
Fascinating - of course this isn’t Larry’s first attempt in this space - remember N-Cubes, wasn’t it?
But I wonder whether Oracle will follow-up, in a year or so, with similar bundles from Sun or even (less likely) IBM. These sort of deals often come with a 6-month or 12-month exclusivity deal. Or is this a poke in the eye by Oracle specifically at Sun?
Oracle and HP have a long, long relationship, but Oracle seemed to have shifted it’s loving attention towards towards Sun for a while. Maybe this is just HP’s way of luring Oracle’s attention back to HP.
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