During that week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled two new products for data-warehousing applications. Called the Database Machine and the Exadata Storage Server, both offerings meld standard hardware from Hewlett Packard with Oracle’s business software.

The new HP Oracle Database Machine, which is packaged in a separate rack that can be ordered as a complete system, integrates a grid of Oracle database servers with a grid comprised of Oracle’s new Exadata Storage Servers, each of which integrates two InfiniBand pipes capable of delivering 1GB/sec of info to the database grid.

“This is the most dramatic announcement in storage in a decade, and could have the effect of significantly lowering total cost of ownership and improving performance across database applications of all kinds,” said Andrew Reichman, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “If they can deliver on their promises, all the major storage vendors should be watching their backs.”

Minimizing notes Movement

Though each Exadata Storage Server can be equipped with up to 12TB of raw storage, Ellison said the new offering is much more “than a bunch of dumb disk drives.” It’s intelligent, he said, considering the platform integrates two Intel quad-core processors.

“This allows us to put intelligence right next to every disk drive in the storage system to reduce the amount of documents that flows across that interconnect within the storage servers and the database servers,” he said.

Exadata is designed to eliminate performance bottlenecks by shipping less details through larger pipes. “We’ve taken a tremendous burden off of the interconnect within the storage grid and the database grid by returning selected query results rather than all the disk blocks,” Ellison said.

Oracle’s new storage server additionally employs a massively parallel architecture and smart storage software to offload data-intensive query processing from…

Orginal post by Mike

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