Oracle is teaming with Hewlett-Packard to launch the HP Oracle Database Machine to penetrate deeper into the data warehousing space. The product combines Oracle's database software with HP's extensive data storage capabilities in a bid to shake up the data warehousing market. The HP Oracle Database Machine's Exadata Storage Server, which can support up to 12TB of raw storage data and leverages InfiniBand connectivity, is part of a move to challenge data warehousing vendors Teradata and Netezza.In a move meant to shake up the data
warehousing market, Oracle has unveiled a data warehouse product focused on
high performance.
Dubbed the HP Oracle Database Machine, the appliance is aimed squarely at
challenging data
warehousing vendors Teradata and Netezza. At the core of the product is the
Exadata Storage Server, which can support up to 12TB of raw storage data and
leverages InfiniBand connectivity.
Oracle officially pulled the covers off the product Sept. 24 at the Oracle
OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
The announcement had been cloaked in secrecy, with many people initially
guessing the "database innovation" Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison was going to discuss during his keynote had to do with Oracle
Database 11g Release 2.
Each database machine contains 14 storage servers as well as eight Oracle
database servers with 64 Intel processor cores. The hardware for the device
will be manufactured exclusively by Hewlett-Packard.
Prior to the keynote, Oracle President Charles Phillips said the release of
the hardware moves Oracle into a segment of the database business the company
hadn't participated in. He pointed out, however, that this was not part of a
move into general-purpose hardware by the company, only an extension of its
database product line.
"It's a hardware product combined with software, essentially a database
appliance, to compete directly against Teradata and Netezza," Phillips said.
"If you look at IBM, they sell a lot of
different hardware configurations but they actually don't package it in this
way, they don't have anything directly comparable to this. In storage,
everybody has some sort of storage, but none of them have the offloaded query
processing."
Shifting the data-intensive part of query processing away from the database
layer and putting it at the storage layer is a key part of the company's
strategy for speeding up data warehousing. Performance bottlenecks are one of
the main problems enterprises face in data warehousing, explained Charles
Rozwat, executive vice president of product development at Oracle.
"There's storage and then there's database servers that actually do
processing of the data, and the bandwidth between them is such it's just not
fast enough to process all the data that's being requested," Rozwat said
during an interview with eWEEK.
Oracle's solution is to reduce the amount of data flowing between the
storage system and the database server and improve connectivity speed.
"With our storage software here, we actually do some of the processing
down on that [storage] device as opposed to doing all of it back up in the
database server," Rozwat said. "So we're shipping significantly less
data back from the storage subsystem up to the database server, which is a huge
speed-up."
The HP Oracle Database Machine and Exadata Storage
Server are available now.
