Oracle's Ellison shows off new tech hardware

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison unveiled new all-in-one data center products as the world’s No.3 software maker steps up its move into the hardware market. Speaking on Sunday at the start of Oracle’s annual technology and user conference in San Francisco, Ellison touted the benefits of parallel computing and showed off the latest version of the company’s SPARC Solaris computer. He also unveiled Oracle’s new Exalytics data analysis machine, “hardware and software engineered to deliver data analysis at the speed of thought,”

OpenWorld 2011 - New innovations

Ellison said at the OpenWorld conference, which is expected to attract more than 40,000 people. With its multi-billion purchase of Sun Microsystems last year, Oracle is aggressively stepping into the hardware business and competing against vendors including former partner Hewlett-Packard. Ellison spent much of his speech pitching the idea of parallel computing, where computers are built with multiple processors and other components that work simultaneously, improving overall performance.

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“How do we make this thing to go 10 times faster? Parallel everything,” Ellison said. “Lots and lots of parallel network connections moving enormous amounts of data in parallel. That’s how you make this thing go faster.” Last year, the company launched Exalogic, combining hardware technology acquired in Oracle’s multi-billion dollar purchase of Sun Microsystems with its own software. Oracle so far has installed 1,000 of its Exadata database machines with customers and sales are going well, he said. Oracle has long compete with European software giant SAP AG and IBM in the business software and database products markets.