Oracle enters hardware business with high-speed data warehouse server

As Oracle enters the hardware game, data in the enterprise "is proliferating at astonishingly high rates," Ellison said.

"That creates a fundamental problem. The disk storage systems that are available today ... can store 10TB, 100TB of data, but they can't move that data off the disks and into the database servers very fast," he said.

There are two ways to solve the data bandwidth problem, he said: reduce the amount of data going through the pipes or make the pipes wider. Oracle did both, he said. He claimed the resulting product is much faster than competing data warehousing systems, such as those sold by Teradata Corp. and Netezza Corp.

"Teradata has no intelligence in their storage server whatsoever. None," Ellison said, while allowing that Teradata's database is "pretty sophisticated."

"Netezza does very fast table scans," he said, "but their overall database capability is really primitive."

Netezza's president, Jim Baum, shot back quickly in a statement. He dismissed the Oracle-HP products, saying data warehouses need to be designed "from the ground up" by engineers in the same company, not patched together "with glue and spit."

A Teradata spokesman was more diplomatic.

"On a high level, it's very difficult for us to comment on the performance claims of Oracle. ... We respect all of our competitors and look forward to competing against Oracle with this new offering," said Randy Lea, Teradata vice president of product and services marketing.

"We're still trying to understand it a little bit more and get more detail," Lea said. "We're not exactly sure what type of smart storage they're using and what advantages and limitations there are at this point in time."

Still another competitor weighed in.

"Oracle still has to prove their credibility in the large database space, which was traditionally Teradata and more recently companies like ours," said Scott Yara, founder and president of Greenplum Inc., another data warehousing appliance vendor. "This was about them trying to achieve parity."

In a blog posting Wednesday, Forrester Research Inc. analyst James Kobielus called the products "a bold move into petabyte scale-out territory -- an emerging, very-high-end niche in which one veteran vendor, Teradata, has been preeminent."

Kobielus also saw a challenge to Netezza.

"Like that vendor's appliance, the Oracle Database Machine offloads SQL query processing and large-table scans to an intelligent storage layer," he wrote. "Whereas Netezza uses a technique that involves field-programmable gate arrays, Oracle has leveraged its 11g technology to parallelize query/scan execution to a massively parallel pool of Exadata storage cells."

Oracle's storage layer is transparent to applications, meaning they don't need to be rewritten to see performance gains, he wrote. That said, Oracle is "just one of several [data warehouse] vendors that have petabyte-scale solutions. It's best not to get all whipped up in a lather by an artfully constructed, event-based marketing tease."

More information about the Exadata Storage Server is available on HP's Web site.

Computerworld's Eric Lai contributed to this report.