For those of you who didn’t see the Larry Ellison’s keynote here it is courtesy to Sheeri.

We cut out the HP part but I don’t think anyone will complain. It’s not the best angle but we didn’t get there early in advance to secure the right location for the camera.

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*Updated* see comments.
Exadata — the smart storage server. I am definitely excited about this product, but my point of view is a bit different.

It’s fast, and much faster than anything out there right now. But how many shops will actually need this? How many shops can spend 2.2 million dollars on hardware and equipment?

What are the products, in a nutshell? The Oracle Exadata Storage Server (Data Sheet, PDF):

• 2U Storage “unit” with either 1 TB SAS or 3.3 TB SATA redundant capacity. There is a query processor in the box that can “offload” tasks from the main database server. Primary filtering, decompression, joins, backups.
• Storage units linked to database servers via dual Infiniband offering 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GBytes/sec) bandwidth

The Database Machine (Data Sheet, PDF):

• A standard 42U rack with 8 database servers and 12 Exadata storage servers.
• Pre-installed Linux and Oracle. Pre-configured.
• In 8 servers — a total of 256GB RAM, 64 Intel cores @ 2.66 Ghz, InfiniBand-ed and gigabit-switched.

The cost for one Database Machine: $2.33M ($650,000 + $1,680,000 in software) as grabbed from Larry’s keynote (thank chet) I called the “call us now” phone mentioned on the Oracle Exadata website to ask them for pricing. They had no idea what I was asking about, and I’m still waiting on a salesperson to call me back. (Hint for Oracle — educate your sales staff about new products, just in case I decide to buy one the day after you announce it.)

You have to realize how “cheap” this is. It comes down to $25,000 per core for Oracle EE, RAC, and Partitioning! And extra “free” CPUs for decompressing, filtering and joining, and backups. That’s a good deal. Oh, did I mention you can interconnect several 42U racks?

Back to the main question, what problems does this product solve?

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