by Simon Quicke
25 September 2008
Oracle’s OpenWorld event is likely to be remembered for the
moment that the CEO Larry Ellison announced that the vendor was entering the
hardware market.
After 30 years of being a pure software player the
announcement of a storage server, to be produced with Hewlett-Packard, had
provided further evidence of market convergence.
The Exdata Storage Server will carry the Oracle badge and
use its software to produce a product that Ellison boasted would be quicker
than rival offerings.
“For the first time, customers can get smart performance
storage designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is ten times faster,” said a
modest Ellison.
In an audience that included resellers as well as customers
he said that it had come up with an answer to the bandwidth problems that could
not be handled by traditional storage servers.
The idea is to use the Exdata servers set up across an
Oracle grid and database to make the passage of information across a business
quicker.
The vendor also used the event to promote its latest
advances in Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) and Beehive, which offers
online collaboration tools to customers that are using its database technology.
