Oracle shrinks Exadata for small businesses

Oracle has released a hardware appliance built on top of x86 servers, after its chief executive, Larry Ellison, said he didn't care if that portion of the business went bust.

The Oracle Database Appliance is a 4U box with pre-installed Oracle Linux and Oracle appliance manager software, Oracle said on Wednesday. It combines servers, storage and networking in one. It is modelled on the all-in-one Exadata appliance.

It was announced shortly after Ellison said on the company's first quarter earnings call "I don't care if our commodity x86 business goes to zero."

"We have no interest in selling other people's IP. Commodity x86 includes Intel IP and Microsoft IP," he said.

The appliance is built on two servers with two 6-core Intel Xeon processors each. The servers are linked to one another via Gigabit Ethernet. Storage is split between 12TB of triple-mirror SAS disk capacity — 10 disks per server — and 292GB of flash memory — two drives per server. The flash is designed to speed the rate at which data can be got in and out of Oracle's bundled database software.

"With the Oracle Database Appliance, customers get the power of the world's leading database in a highly-available system from a single vendor," Andrew Menelsohn, a senior vice president for the company, said in a statement. "We’ve taken the risk out of designing and deploying database infrastructures, which makes it ideal for small and midsize companies or enterprise departments that want higher availability for their application databases."

The appliance has redundant power supplies and cooling. The hardware portion will cost around $50,000 (£32,523) and extra money will need to be spent on the database component. Licensing will alter depending on how many processing cores are used. Further information on the system is expected at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in October.