At last year's Oracle Open World, Larry Ellison announced Exadata, a storage server that is pre-tuned for data warehousing applications. The combination of hardware and software working closely together yields a great performance boost over traditional configurations. Exadata storage servers combined with database servers running Linux and Oracle 11g make up the Database Machine, a complete solution in a rack.
Now Oracle has announced Exadata v2, which is reportedly twice as fast and in additional to handling data warehousing duties, also works for OLTP (transactional) applications. And this time instead of partnering with HP, Oracle has partnered with (drum-roll) Sun Microsystems. Not exactly a surprise, I guess.
Looking at the bigger picture, appliances have been gaining favor for specialized applications such as data warehousing, but this announcement is a more general-purpose solution. Instead of being limited to the data warehouse, this solution could impact planning, merchandising, and supply chain applications as well. This could get interesting.
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