During a keynote presentation last week at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, the new Oracle Big Data Appliance, an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g, was announced by Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Product Development, Oracle.
Described by Kurian as an integrated big data platform, the new appliance is intended to provide customers with an end-to-end solution for big data.
Engineered to work together, the Oracle Big Data Appliance is easily integrated with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, and is designed to deliver analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class performance, availability, supportability and security.
A key element of the new Big Data Appliance is the Oracle NoSQL Database Enterprise Edition, a distributed, scalable, key-value database. Unlike competitive solutions, says Oracle, the NoSQL Database is easy to install, configure and manage, supports a broad set of workloads, and delivers enterprise-class reliability backed by enterprise-class Oracle support. The new appliance also includes the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, which simplifies data integration from Hadoop and an Oracle Database through an easy to use interface; and the Oracle Loader for Hadoop, which enables customers to use Hadoop MapReduce processing to create optimized data sets for efficient loading and analysis in Oracle Database 11g. In addition, the system includes Oracle R Enterprise, which integrates the open source statistical environment R with Oracle Database 11g, enabling analysts and statisticians to run existing R applications and use the R client directly against data stored in Oracle Database 11g, thereby increasing scalability, performance and security.
The Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and Oracle R Enterprise will be available as standalone software products, independent of the Oracle Big Data Appliance.
Monday's joint keynote addresses were presented to a standing-room-only crowd at Moscone North. Introduced by Oracle president Safra Catz, Joe Tucci, chairman, president, and CEO of EMC, talked about the challenges presented by enterprise IT issues such as budgetary concerns, high data growth, and cyber security, and the enormous opportunity presented by cloud computing. Change is disruptive, he said, but offers massive opportunity if it is handled correctly.
Tucci's presentation was followed by others, including Oracle president Mark Hurd, who was introduced by San Francisco mayor Ed Lee. Hurd looked back at the highlights of 2011 for Oracle, and discussed the advantages to customers that result from Oracle's approach of a complete, integrated stack consisting of applications, middleware, database, operating system, virtual machine, servers and storage. He pointed to the simplicity enabled by Oracle's range of engineered systems, including the Exadata, Exalogic, the recently announced Sparc SuperCluster, and just-announced Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, before turning the stage over to Kurian.
For more information, visit the Oracle website.