Ellison Touch Pure Oracle Red Hardware, Software Stack at OpenWorld

2. The move to solid state memory, whether as flash-based storage or in-memory applications, continues. Oracle announced an in-memory function which Ellison said was as easy as flicking a switch. The addition of the in-memory product, which Oracle promised to deliver next year, but without mentioning prices, also included a new function which simultaneously stores data in row and column format. The row capability is for fast transactional performance while the column function is for analytics. This function will make it possible to eliminate analytics indexes which slow performance. The in-memory function is a competitor to SAP’s HANA and IBM in-memory competitors. “Your results are instantaneous,” Ellison said.

3. Oracle also introduced a database backup appliance, but it will not be available until next year. The appliance is designed to provide backup of entire Oracle databases and challenges the file based backup appliance vendors. Backup is a traditionally difficult task because backing up files does not mean the underlying database structure will be able to recover from a disaster.

Oracle introduced its M6-32 Big Data machine. The M6 CPU has 12 cores (twice as many as the M5), 96 threads for parallel processing and up to 32TB of memory. The silicon-based switching network allows throughput at 3T bps. Ellison said the box will be available for about $3 million, which he said is less than half of an equivalent IBM offering.

Hadoop and cloud computing is not excluded from the Oracle universe. In general, the idea is for Oracle to live in harmony with big data, which are largely Hadoop-based offerings. The concept is that the Hadoop data would be sucked into the Oracle environment that would perform the typical and speedy SQL querying.

The big message from Oracle is integration through a complete top-to-bottom stack and speed of installation as Oracle does the integration work for you. You just have to buy into the Oracle program to reach Ellison’s red nirvana.

Eric Lundquist is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. Lundquist, who was editor-in-chief at eWEEK (previously PC WEEK) from 1996-2008 authored this article for eWEEK to share his thoughts on technology, products and services. No investment advice is offered in this article. All duties are disclaimed. Lundquist works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this article and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.