Analysts welcome Oracle Database Appliance for SMBs

Oracle has announced a new Database Appliance designed to bring the benefits of Exadata into a smaller package for SMBs.

The integrated hardware and software offers online transaction processing and data warehousing applications, and is available on pay-as-you-go licensing.

"This brings the benefits of Exadata to entry level systems, departmental systems and the SMB market," said Oracle president Mark Hurd during an online announcement.

"It's the enterprise edition of the Oracle Database, engineered with the hardware together, with one-touch automated patching."

Following Hurd's comments, Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle database server technologies president, discussed the hardware and software that will be available as part of the appliance.

The Database Appliance hardware consists of two dual-socket Linux servers with 12TB of raw disk storage and 292GB of solid state storage.

The software consists of Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, which provides automatic storage management, and Oracle Real Application Clusters, which protects databases from server and storage failures. Oracle Linux software and Appliance Manager software are also part of the package.

Oracle launched Exadata in 2009 and marketed it as the first industry appliance to combine data warehousing and online transaction processing, using Sun Microsystems hardware and Oracle software.

The latest Exadata X2-8 appliance comprises two eight-socket database servers with 128 Intel CPU cores and 2TB of memory. Much of last year's annual customer event OpenWorld was spent talking up Exadata's success.

"Anything Oracle can do to bring Exadata to a broader market is a good idea, as long as the manageability benefits go with it, like the one-push button monitoring and provisioning," Tony Lock, an analyst at Freeform Dynamics, told V3.

But Lock stressed that the Database Appliance is not just a mini Exadata.

"Exadata can be used for everything, for whatever applications and data a customer needs in there. But this new appliance is plug-in, and just has the database software," he said.

Lock added that the "appliance benefits" are not to be overlooked.

"Customers will like the fact that it is a single order number and they don't have to separately order the servers, the storage, the software and the networking gear," he said. "It will be easy to maintain and, most importantly, easy to manage."

The fact that the appliance is available on a pay-as-you-go basis will be attractive for customers, according to the analyst.

"When the customers buy a system, they buy the best they can. But in times when cash is restrained, it makes senses to buy as they go, and then when they get more budget, they buy more capabilities," he said.