I asked Lee Johns, Marketing Director at HP StorageWorks, to give me a bit of details about the Oracle Exadata Storage Server by HP that I mentioned last week in a blog post.  We are having a hard time getting Lee into our team blog to post this himself so I'll give you the details of what Lee sent me in his email.  Here's what he said:

The HP-Oracle offering is the answer to solving bandwidth problems associated with database queries. According to Larry Ellison, there are two ways to solve this bandwidth problem:

1. reduce the amount of data that is moving or
2. create wider pipes for moving the data.

Since industry analysts are citing data growth as doubling every 18 months, option 1 is not the answer. The premise behind Exadata is that it is not just dumb disk drives, but intelligence next to every disk drive that increases the speed of each query and returns query results via the disk drives. Performance that impacts all areas of a data center is the focus for evolving technology.   HP and Oracle have figured this out and intend to reach customers through the anticipation of data growth and the innovation of technology that allows customers to meet this growing demand. 

The Oracle Exadata Storage Server by HP is a storage grid building block built on a ProLiant DL180-G5 platform.  It is a 2U, 2 Socket Intel Quad-core server with 12 large form factor (LFF) 3.5" disk drives for either 3.6 TB or 12 TB (depending on the customers choice of HP disk technology).  It is supported as a new revolutionary scalable storage architecture behind a cluster of Oracle 11g RAC database servers.  The appliance-like data warehouse solution is a fully configured rack, including eight ProLiant DL360 Oracle 11g RAC database servers and fourteen DL180 Exadata Storage Servers for a total capacity of either 50TB or 168TB in a single 42u rack. All hardware components come preinstalled in an HP rack with a high performance Infiniband fabric and ProCurve network switches.  HP's Factory Express integration and global sales/services reach are strong benefits to Oracle's choice of HP as the exclusive hardware provider.

The products will be co-branded with HP and Oracle.  Oracle will lead the sales engagement - targeting their top data warehouse customers globally. The expectation is for the HP sales team to engage and provide hardware expertise for the HP technologies.  Likewise Oracle will provide first response regarding service engagement and transfer all hardware calls directly to HP's Technology Services organization for resolution. 

This gets me to a dirty little secret in the storage industry.  Many storage platforms, especially newer implementations are actually build from industry standard servers.  What happens when the leader in Industry Standard Servers uses that position to drive new powerful Storage architectures?  The HP/Oracle Exadata product is one example.  Watch this space.  The world of storage is about to get more exciting.