Headline Feeds
The sidewalks were still jammed around San Francisco's Moscone Center and the wonderment of an Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) 
hardware announcement was still palpable across the IT infrastructure 
universe late last week. I sat down with two executives, from HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Oracle, to get the early deep-dive briefing on the duo's Exadata appliance shocker.
Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison caught the Oracle OpenWorld conference audience by surprise the day before 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 (Nasdaq: GOOG) use with MapReduce technologies. Ellison referred to the storage servers as "programmable."
New Status Quo
Listen to a podcast interview with HP's Rich Palmer and Oracle's Willie Hardie (55:26 minutes)
Exadata also re-architects the HP-Oracle relationship, making HP an Oracle storage partner extraordinaire -- thereby upsetting the status quo of the world's of IT storage, databases and data warehouses markets.
Furthermore, Exadata leverages parallelism and high-performance industry standard hardware to bring "extreme business intelligence" to more enterprises, all in a neat standalone package that's forklift-ready. Beyond 10 terabytes and into the petabyte range was how HP and Oracle designers describe the scale and 10x to 72x typical performance gains from the high-end Exadata "Machine."
A Deeper Look
The unveiling clearly deserves more detail, more understanding. Listen then as I interview 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.
The interview comes as part of a series of sponsored discussions with IT executives I've done from the Oracle OpenWorld conference. 
Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, which tracks trends, delivers forecasts and interprets the competitive landscape of enterprise applications and software infrastructure markets for clients. He also produces BriefingsDirect sponsored podcasts. Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.
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