Tech and Web NEWS

Another Lawrence J. Ellison initiative, HP and Oracle team up

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:September 25, 2008

Another Lawrence J. Ellison initiative, HP and Oracle team up, Oracle CEO, Lawrence J. Ellison, in front of a packed auditorium at San Francisco’s Moscone Center declared that Oracle, the world’s largest seller of database software, was for the first time going to enter the computer hardware industry. The new machines which are to be manufactured and maintained by one of the Valley’s other stalwarts, Hewlett-Packard, will enable large corporations the ability to access and manage data at much greater speeds. No word, as yet from the 64-year old, on when these new machines will be on the market. Oracle’s stock closed up slightly at $19.95 on a relatively quiet day on Wall Street, but the share went down $0.15 in after-hours trading. HP was down $0.10 and closed at $46.78 as investors seem to be waiting on the sidelines as lawmakers still mull over the Paulson-Bernanke bail-out plan.

So what exactly is new about this new Oracle/HP DW appliance and its Exadata grid storage layer? For Oracle’s positioning in the DW market, this new product is a bold move into petabyte scale-out territory, an emerging, very-high-end niche in which one veteran vendor, Teradata, has been pre-eminent (though, in fact, most real-world enterprise DWs barely go beyond 10-15 TB, for which Oracle’s existing DBMS/DW stack, which can push into the 100s of TBs, is more than sufficient).

But it’s not just a shot across Teradata’s prominent bow. Oracle’s new DW appliance platform also allows it to joust more effectively with the upstart appliance pure-plays–in particular, Netezza. Like that vendor’s appliance, the Oracle Database Machine offloads SQL query processing and large-table scans to an intelligent storage layer. Whereas Netezza uses a technique that involves field-programmable gate arrays, Oracle has leveraged its 11g technology to parallelize query/scan execution to a massively parallel pool of Exadata storage cells. Just as important, this storage layer is transparent to applications, which need not be rewritten to tap into the grid-based performance boost.

Oh…a related thought….before Larry came on stage, Oracle’s Safra Catz described HP as “our closest partner.” I wonder what that says about Oracle’s relationships with its other hardware partners under the Oracle Optimized Warehouse program. Is HP now first among equals among Oracle’s appliance partners? Though we Oracle says that its (less scalable, 10g-centric) Oracle Optimized Warehouse Warehouse partnerships with IBM, Sun, Dell/EMC, and SGI (and of course HP), are still important, these other partners can quite clearly see that the HP is the partner that Oracle considers most strategic in its battle against DW arch-nemeses Teradata and Netezza.

The Exadata Programmable Storage Server appliance and the HP Oracle Database Machine, a black and red refrigerator-size full database, storage and network data center on wheels, made their debt at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Ellison called the Machine the fastest database in the world.HP Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd called the HP Oracle Database Machine a “data warehouse appliance.” It leverages the architecture improvements in the Exadata Programmable Storage Server, but at the much larger scale and with other optimization benefits.

“We needed radical new thinking to deliver high performance,” said Ellison of the new hardware configurations, comparing the effort to the innovative design for his controversial America’s Cup boat. “We need much more performance out of databases than what we get.”The HP Oracle Database Machine is made up of a grid of eight database servers with 64 Intel processor cores and a grid of 14 Exadata servers with up to 168 Terabytes of combined data storage capacity and 14 Gbps data bandwidth. The system is pre-configured for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition tools and Oracle Real Application Clusters clustering technology.

Ellison showed a number of slides favorably comparing the HP Oracle Database Machine’s performance and operating costs to competing products from Teradata and Netezza, as well as slides showing the results of test runs of the system at customer sites. But then he answered what he called the burning question. “It holds a really lot of songs,” he said to the audience’s laughter, saying it has a capacity “1,400″ times that of Apple’s biggest iPod. Oracle and HP engineers have been working on the product for three years, Ellison said, although the details have been kept under wraps. The two companies will also produce an HP Oracle Database Machine, which combines the new storage servers with database servers in one large box for $650,000.

Like this article! ‹ Lawrence J. Ellison Alan D. Horn, to replace Ted Rogers at Rogers Communications Inc. ›
Share this Post: Get It Delivered To Your Inbox