As per an announcement on Wednesday,Oracle is planning to capture a new market of small scaled companiesusing its Exadata data processing machine. The company announcedabout its new database appliances shaped as per the need and budgetrequirements of SMB’s.

According to an announcement made byco-president Mark Hurd, the new database appliance by Oracle is an“exciting stuff” and includes “the benefits of Exadata toentry-level systems.”

As per the announcement the price ofhardware would be US$50,000. The complete configuration includes twoSun Fire servers, 192GB of main memory, 24 processor cores, 12TB ofraw disk storage as well as 292GB of solid-state disk.

Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice presidentof Oracle server technologies reported, “Everything isfault-tolerant and redundant.” He further said, “It's quite anamazing engineered system.” Adding more he said that this productwould never have been created by the midmarket customers themselves.

The software stack used in theappliance is quite similar to that in Exadata. This includes the 11gdatabase, Real Application Clusters or RAC clustering software andOracle Linux. This software features the Appliance Manager Softwarewhich is used for automatic monitoring and patching. Mendelsohnadded, the system “even calls [Oracle] support if you have ahardware failure. Before the customer knows it we'll have an Oracletechnician out there fixing the part, and the customer may have hadno idea anything failed at all.”

Oracle said that its customers can buythe appliance and run it in just a few hours. The main customerdatabase of Oracle includes the ones using older hardware’s undertheir Oracle database and want to upgrade the system. Those who wantto merge smaller databases like third party vendors on a singleplatform are the ideal customers.

The new module offered by Oracle to itscustomers is “pay as you grow.” Initially, the customers can getlicensed software’s for two cores. Over a period of time they cango up to 24-core limit as per their preference. Oracle officials haveannounced that the customers can grow at par to their existingdatabases and RAC licenses when preferred.

According to Hurd, “We're trying toincrease our target market with this, so we're trying to package itin the most attractive way we possibly can.”

Mendelsohn said that it is not in thecustomer’s potential to chain the multiple database appliances.Thus, if customers would require any extra power, they will have tomove up to smallest or quarter rack Exadata configuration. Thus, theinitial price of quarter rack system is US$330,000 with support.However, other costs would significantly increase its price.

Mendelsohn reported that once thetriple mirroring is factored in, the 12TB of storage on databaseappliance works out to max with a database size of 4TB.

Hurd added, “You can run a lot ofworkloads on that box. If you want to go beyond that, we've got ananswer. You go to Exadata.”

Thus, this newest move by Oracle statesits desire to avoid the commodity server market and opted out forselling engineered systems.