Oracle Unveils Exalytics

This new in-memory appliance is Oracle’s latest whiz-bang IT machine. Exalytics comprises a Sun Fire X4470 M2 server, which is a four-socket, 3U-size box running Intel’s multicore (in this case, 10 CPUs) Westmere-EX Xeon E7 processor. As such, it features 40 processors. Each box can store an impressive 5TB to 10TB of deduplicated, compressed data.

Even though storage is a dicey topic when the two IT giants get together, EMC’s Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger spoke onstage in glowing terms of EMC/Oracle’s many common customers (some 70,000) and how they remain committed to servicing those installations for years to come. For the time being it’s no matter that Oracle eventually wants to supply all the hardware and software for those same customers.

The data storage provider announced the Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance Sept. 22 (but demonstrated it at the show) as the industry’s first “complete” big data analytics platform that can handle several petabytes of data. This is a plug-in appliance that enables IT shops to combine a shared-nothing macro pre-processor (MPP) relational database with enterprise-class Apache Hadoop in a single, unified box to process both structured and unstructured data.

Trellis, which runs on Oracle Java middleware and is expected to become available early in 2012, is an open architecture-based data center infrastructure management (DCIM) package with real-time event-analysis capabilities across all physical and logical systems in the data center. It is being tested on a selected-customer basis at this time.

Oracle is showcasing Oracle Solaris 11 at Oracle OpenWorld this week, ahead of its planned release in November of this year. Oracle Solaris is a mature enterprise operating system for both SPARC and x86 systems. It fares well in cloud systems, enabling secure and fast deployment of services in a large-scale cloud environment.

Oracle’s Big Data Appliance offers customers an end-to-end solution for Big Data. Used in conjunction with Exadata Database Machine and the new Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, Oracle is claiming these machines deliver everything users need to acquire, organize, analyze and maximize the value of Big Data within their enterprise. The Big Data Appliance is what Oracle is calling an “engineered system” that includes an open-source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop and an open-source distribution of MapR.

Star Analytics, which makes application process automation and integration software, announced the latest release of Star Command Center, an enterprise solution that reduces the cost and complexity of managing hybrid business intelligence (BI) environments. This software enhances automation history tracing for file resources, processes and environments, providing insights into “who ran what, where and how.”

The company announced the addition of an “Oracle Powers the Cloud” event on Thursday, Oct. 6, to talk about its “Foundation for Public and Private Clouds,” the company’s long-term cloud strategy and product road map. Oracle executives will discuss how all its full-service software, hardware and services can be optimized to work with cloud application services.

Oracle launched a NoSQL Database, based on the venerable but effective BSD system. Since Oracle already has acquired a variety of database products ranging from the acquisition of RDB from DEC to Sleepycat and TimesTen to MySQL (acquired with Sun Microsystems), it is well-positioned for releasing such a product, which is gaining traction in the enterprise market.

Dell’s own networking division (surprise!) revealed that it is the first networking provider to have achieved Oracle Validated Integration with its Dell Force10 Open Automation Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, which is designed to provide deeper visibility into the networking stack for both physical and virtual infrastructure.