Briefings Direct

The sidewalks were still jammed around San Francisco's Moscone Center and the wonderment of an Oracle hardware announcement was still palpable across the IT infrastructure universe late last week. Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison caught the Oracle OpenWorld conference audience by surprise Sept. 24 by rolling out the Exadata line of two hardware-software configurations. The integrated servers re-architect the relationship between Oracle's 11g database and high-performance storage. Exadata, in essence, gives new meaning to "attached" storage for Oracle databases. It mimics the close pairing of data and logic execution that such cloud providers as Google use with MapReduce technologies. The unveiling clearly deserves more detail, more understanding. Listen as Dana Gardner interviews Rich Palmer, director of technology and strategy for the industry standard servers group at HP, along with Willie Hardie, vice president Oracle database product marketing, on the inside story on Exadata for BriefingsDirect. The discussion took place Sept. 25, 2008 at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.