Oracle Takes Aim At Hardware Competitors With Channel-Ready Database Appliance

Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL) on Wednesday unveiled a turnkey database appliance -- its first appliance product offering -- in a bid to boost sales of the company's flagship database software and Sun Microsystems hardware to SMBs.

The new Oracle Database Appliance bundles Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (Enterprise Edition) software with Real Application Clusters technology and other Oracle software on a two-node, Intel-based Sun Fire server running Oracle Linux.

Channel partners see a range of market opportunities for the product. "This performs better than any rack cluster any customer has now," said John Ezzell, co-founder and executive vice-president of BIAS Corp., an Atlanta-based Oracle Platinum partner. Many customers today run database systems made up of "bolted together" hardware, database and storage technologies from multiple vendors. The Oracle Database Appliance "gives you a way to have everything contained in one box," Ezzell said.

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