Software giant Oracle made official its intention to enter the computer hardware business. The company debuted in this segment with Exadata Storage Server and a Database Machine. The new machines that were unveiled by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday were built in collaboration with computer-manufacturing behemoth Hewlett Packard.

"Oracle is getting into the hardware business but we are not doing it alone," the company’s chief executive said during an Oracle Open World 2008 conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center.

"Conventional storage arrays simply cannot compete with the Oracle-HP Database Machine."

The HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine are built on HP’s ProLiant platform. Both were built with intelligence next to each disk, which makes processing a lot faster.

"We need much more performance out of our databases than we currently get” Ellison said in his speech.

"We had to go beyond software to solve the problem."

The two machines are the result of years of research by Oracle and HP which have been searching for solutions to solve the problem posed by the massive growth of data businesses jam-packed into their machines. The digital info is almost tripling with each year that passes and the people who need to access it is also increasing rapidly, industry experts said.

According to Ellison, the two machines are the result of three years of collaboration between Oracle and HP. He labeled the HP Oracle Database Machine as the "world's fastest database machine." The device features 8 Oracle Database Servers; 64 Intel processor cores and operates on Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Real App Clusters. The machine also has 14 HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Servers which feature a data bandwidth of 14 Gbps, 112 x86 processor cores. Its total storage capacity is of 168 terabytes.

Meanwhile, the HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server features 2 quad-core Intel processors, 12 disk drives (12 terabytes) plus 2 InfiniBand pipes that can transfer data at a speed of about 1Gbps to the data grid. It operates the Oracle Parallel Query Database application on Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Some customers such as Amazon.com and BT Group manifested their interest in the machines long before they were publicly unveiled. Oracle and HP offered a beta version to the above-mentioned possible customers for tests since last October.  

"We loaned them half a machine each instead of a whole machine because we're really cheap," Ellison said before a laughing audience.