Larry Ellison becomes HP's richest reseller yet

Comment HP has expanded its reseller channel with a Sun Thumper-bashing griddled hybrid storage/server just for Oracle.

Oracle is selling an HP Oracle Database Machine, a customised bundle of Oracle database and data warehouse software running on a grid of eight HP Proliant servers running Oracle RAC, and 14 specialised Exadata servers, database query offload engines, with two quad-core Xeons, 14 SAS drives, HP software for parallel query processing, and Voltaire InfiniBand grid connectivity.

For the Exadata piece think clustered Sun Thumpers (X4500s); that's the basic hardware model. Unlike Sun though, with its mould-breaking X4500, HP didn't to go it alone and has been working for three years or so - overlapping Thumper development - with Oracle on speeding up data warehouse queries. Sun used to be an Oracle favourite and this could be seen as a missed Thumper opportunity. It may have GreenPlum using the X4500 in this data warehouse/business intelligence area, but HP has snaffled the biggest plum of all. Eat your heart out Sun.

This is also Oracle talking to Terradata and the Netezza-type data warehouse appliance suppliers. "You're not on your own any longer, boys" is what Larry is saying.

HP CEO Mark Hurd was billed to speak this week at Oracle World along with Ann Livermore and we figured this was odd. Why would you need two top HP honchos to do the job? In the event Hurd did speak, but via video link. Pshaw! This virtual presence stuff is getting boring. (Note to conference organisers: don't bill video-linked speakers without specifying the video link.)

HP has a big grin on its face, while Dell, Pillar and others with Oracle-ised product offerings look a little less happy. They're side shows compared to HP, sitting at the top table with Larry and his gang. Less so EMC with its flash drive-boosted Symmetrix for Oracle.

We didn't get flash storage in the Exadata boxes, so the performance is not 'that' extreme, yet, and EMC can gloat away. Also Dell and EMC have got together to announce the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Dell and EMC comprising Dell servers and Dell/EMC Clariion CX4 storage with, you guessed it, flash storage. Take that HP.

We reckon HP thinks that flash is still too expensive for the terabytes of storage needed for a data warehouse. Spreading the data across multiple highly intelligent storage arrays and the spindles within them, and with Proliant controllers - that's what an Exadata box is - gives the tenfold performance boost Ellison claimed. Nothing flashy here - yet. ®