HP's big iron helps Oracle ease pent-up server stress
At yesterday's Oracle OpenWorld conference, CEO Larry Ellison donned his best tan and announced a new partnership with Hewlett Packard to sell a hardware and software to speed up databases. A rack of eight devices will include 168 terrabytes of storage and a total of 64 processing cores on 16 Intel microprocessors and will be optimized for Oracle's database software. The idea, as haltingly explained by Ellison in the video above, is to clear the bottleneck between storage servers that hold the data and the database servers that process the requests. We've condensed the speech down to around a minute, but left in the awkward bits so you can wince along with the audience.Ellison goes through this like a Ron Popeil pitch but with less enthusiasm and a stiffer delivery. The audience responds with silence when Ellison issues his applause lines, and can someone get the man a remote control so he doesn't have to terrorize a minion with requests to change the slides? We know the topic doesn't lend itself to the crazed consumer fervor of something like the iPhone, but seriously, I can see attendees muttering "More like Bore-acle OpenWorld" under their breath as they step into the Market Street Cinema.