News

New Oracle Database Appliances Target Smaller Enterprises

• By David Ramel
• 06/24/2016

Oracle Corp. this week added to its Database Appliance portfolio with new offerings designed for small and mid-sized enterprises, costing as little as $18,000.

"We've added two models with an extremely affordable price tag, and that are architected with NVM Express (NVMe) flash storage for super-fast performance," said Oracle exec Tammy Bednar in a blog post this week.

The "extremely affordable price tag" for one new offering, the X6-2S, is $18,000, while the higher-end X6-2M lists for $24,000.

"With an entry list price for the X6-2S at about a fourth of the cost of the prior-generation Oracle Database Appliance, and the capability to deploy in as few as 30 minutes, these new models bring the performance and resource benefits of Oracle engineered systems to within reach of every organization," Bednar said.

Features new to the portfolio include integration with the Oracle Cloud, which lets organizations back up and archive critical data and move workloads to the cloud.

Another new feature is the use of NVMe Flash drives.

"NVMe is the latest standard for PCI Express (PCIe) solid-state drives (SSDs)," Bednar said. "In the Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle's server design connects the disk backplane to an internal PCIe switch that bypasses the SAS controller for NVMe flash storage, eliminating all overhead." NVMe reportedly provides 5x better input/output performance along with low latency and high reliability.

Oracle Database Appliances are designed to run single-instance databases, consolidate multiple databases and feature high-availability designs, the company said.