Oracle Unveils Midmarket Database Appliance

To target smaller enterprises, Oracle is offering a simplified version of its large enterprise database box.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is continuing its move toward engineered systems that integrate hardware and software with a new Oracle Database appliance.

The Oracle Database appliance is a “little brother” to Oracle’s Exadata database box. The new appliance is a clustered two server system that includes up to 24 Intel processor cores and can have as much as 12 TB of shared storage with Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

The system runs Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on top of an Oracle Linux operating system base.

“For this market we want to make things really simple so we have the Oracle Appliance Manager,” Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle Database Server Technologies, said during a press conference. “It makes it easy to provision, patch and monitor what’s going on in a box, it even calls home if there is a hardware failure.”

Oracle is also going with a pay-as-you-grow approach for the Database Appliance.

“So even though there are 24 cores of processing power in the box, you can start small and just license two of the process cores,” Mendelsohn said.

Oracle is also positioning the Database Appliance as a consolidation play for Oracle Databases as well as databases from other vendors, including Microsoft. Mendelsohn noted that Oracle has tooling to help migrate Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases to Oracle.

The database appliance consolidation play is also one that HP is going after. Earlier this year, HP announced its AppSystem, including an engineered system for Microsoft SQL database consolidation.

Read the rest about Oracle’s midmarket database appliance at Database Journal.