Hewlett Packard (HP) claimed on Friday that it would be the first company to ship a so called database appliance preinstalled with Oracle's 8I database.

The appliance is the brainchild of database supplier, Oracle, which in November, announced its 'Raw Iron' project at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. Raw Iron was intended to encourage hardware vendors to ship boxes pre-installed with the Oracle database and the microkernel of a 64-bit realtime operating system (OS) that the firm had built in house from the fastest pieces of other OS's (see VNU Newswire, 18 November, 1998).

While last month, Sun revealed that it intended to ship systems installed with a slimmed down version of its own Solaris Unix OS (see Newswire 14 December, 1998), HP is now attesting that it will be the first to offer the real Mcoy.

Nick Earle, HP's vice president of enterprise computing solutions: "It's quite ironic that the core of this is some form of the Solaris kernel, but we can bring this to market and a company like Sun can't. We think that this could represent an incremental market for us that could represent up to 10 per cent of the Intel based server market."

HP will sell database appliances as part of its Netserver line, costing $7,500 and up, from the first half of 1999.

Gary Bloom , Oracle's executive vice president of system products, said the company was also mulling over whether to produce specialised versions of the appliance to act as email servers or a file servers.