The Oracle Australia and New Zealand Middleware and Technology Blog.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Final Day at Openworld - The Joy of "X"!

Wednesday was very clearly "Larry Day" at the Moscone centre in San Francisco. Overnight the excitement had built in The Blogosophere about the mystery X announcement and speculation was rife.

CFO Safra Catz took the stage at 2.30pm to introduce HP as Oracle's closest partner and largest customer and pretty soon the hardware theme was becoming prevalent. In particular, Ms Livermore highlighted that 51% of CIOs say they need to modernise their datacentre today to meet rapidly growing data requirements.

Then Oracle founder and CEO, Larry J. Ellison, delivered the answer to the question on everyone's lips: what is X? He announced Oracle's formal move into the hardware business. In partnership with HP he first announced the Oracle Exadata Performance Storage Server capable of 1GB per second. Then, explaining with his characteristic sense of humour that it seems a shame to enter the hardware business with only one product, LJE debuted The HP Oracle Database Machine with great fanfare as the huge box - "1400 time the size of the largest iPod" - emerged from out of the stage. Then HP's Mark Hurd was beamed into the Keynote hall by video to add his excitement and to highlight the fact that the whole system is built on open standards.

See Exadata here live on stage, and read the specifics here of the new offering here. Also, listen to Aussie Oracle ACE and blogger Alex Gorbachev give his reaction directly after the keynote and read his live blog from the Moscone Centre. Alex posted several pieces on today's announcements so worth reading extensively.

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