Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison took to the stage today to unveil the Exadata 2 system, describing it as the first to combine data warehousing with online transaction processing.

The first Exadata system, unveiled last year, was a partnership with HP but the new system has been developed with Sun Microsystems, and Oracle will reportedly no longer sell the HP-built system.

"This is hardware by Sun and software by Oracle," said Ellison. "It does data warehousing twice as fast as version one, but also runs online transaction processing, something the competition can't do at all. We can do both, and we do both very well."

Ellison added that the new model uses 80 per cent faster CPUs, 100 per cent faster networking and 200 per cent faster memory. Disk throughput is up 50 per cent, he claimed.

The Oracle chief also took time to rubbish the competition, claiming that the IBM 595 system offers the same processing power, but costs $10.7m (£6.5m) as opposed to $2.7m (£1.6m) for the Oracle equivalent.

"You can spend the same money as IBM but go four times faster," he said. "We are fault tolerant and expandable. IBM has no fault tolerance in its system. They mirror discs but that's about it."