Tag : hardware products

Hardware
September 25, 2008
Oracle Unveils First Hardware Products
By Richard Adhikari

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison today unveiled thedatabase vendor's newest foray into the hardware business, andhopefully this one will fare better than Oracle's Network Computereffort of the late 1990s.
In his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, being held at SanFrancisco's Moscone Convention Center, Ellison announced the HPOracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the HP OracleDatabase Machine. Both are built by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) onits ProLiant platform and have intelligence next to each disk driveto speed up processing.
"We need much more performance out of our databases than wecurrently get because information is proliferating at an astonishing rate and the disk storage systems of today cannot move the data off thedisks into the database server fast enough," Ellison told a packedhouse. "We had to go beyond software to solve the problem."
The HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server consists of twoquad-core Intel processors, 12 disk drives with up to 12 T-bytes ofraw storage capacity and two InfiniBand pipes that transfer data at1Gbps connecting it to the data grid. It drives the Oracle ParallelQuery Database application on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Support forother operating systems is on the way, Ellison said.
Unlike traditional storage servers, which pass disk blocks back tothe database server in response to a query, the Exadata StorageServer only passes query results, Ellison said. Its built-inmanagement application stripes queries across each of its diskdrives so "we search all the drives in parallel," he added.
That combination of approaches "gives us very fast processing inthe storage grid and reduces the traffic flow between the storageand the database grid," Ellison said. The InfiniBand pipes can movedata off the storage server at 5Gbps, but "the limiting factor isthe speed of pulling data off those disk drives, so we can onlymove data off them at 1 Gbps," Ellison said.
Ellison said HP and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked for three years ondeveloping the "world's fastest database machine," the HP OracleDatabase Machine. This has eight Oracle Database Servers; 64 Intelprocessor cores; and runs Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle RealApp Clusters.
The HP Oracle Database Machine also incorporates 14 HP OracleExadata Programmable Storage Servers, with a data bandwidth of 14Gbps, 112 x86 processor cores and a total storage capacity of 168terabytes of data.
Major customers, including Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO). Amazon.com(NASDAQ: AMZN) and BT Group (NYSE: BT), have been beta testing theHP Oracle Database Machine since last October, Ellison said. "Weloaned them half a machine each instead of a whole machine becausewe're really cheap," Ellison said, to laughter from the audience.
All the customers who tested their production workloads on theloaners saw tremendous improvements, Ellison said. That's because"we have intelligent storage servers running parallel queries, andhave more data bandwidth, and conventional disk arrays cannotcompete with that," he added.