Oracle OpenWorld: Top Ten Trends

Among the many developments -- potential and real -- from this year's Oracle OpenWorld, could the database giant be preparing to take on VMware? Drew Robb reports from OpenWorld.

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Now a full-fledged member of the storage community, Oracle made a splash at this week’s OpenWorld conference with a slew of new hardware and software products that quelled any doomsday projections about the fate of the Sun storage portfolio. Oracle is traveling headlong towards domination on as many fronts as possible – and that includes storage.

Here are the top ten takeaways from the week’s event:

Exadata is Gaining Traction

The Sun/Oracle concept of one box optimized to run large databases appears to be working. Oracle’s (NASDAQ: ORCL) new President, Mark Hurd, called Exadata the most successful product Oracle has ever launched with rapid adoption rates in all geographies and industries. Exadata, Hurd said, solves the common problem of traditional systems disintegrating under the demands of four forces: the expansion of data in a huge data warehouse, a high volume of users accessing it, those users ask hard questions about that data, and users wanting answers really fast.

“When all four come together, systems fall apart and querying takes a long time,” said Hurd. “Exadata changed the game by putting intelligence in the storage so users didn’t have to spend time looking for the data.”

While the first release of Exadata focused on the data warehouse, this week’s release has broader appeal. Known as Exadata X2-8, it includes beefier processors, more memory (2TB), enhanced security, Flash-based cache and a choice of Solaris or Oracle Unbreakable Linux. That adds up to 1 million I/Os per second (IOPS).

“It is the best in class for all database or OLTP workloads,” said Hurd. “It will be out within 30 or 40 days and is being sold now.”

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.