Ellison Brandishes ‘Speed of Thought’ Exalytics Appliance

OpenWorld Larry Ellison is serious about hardware because he is serious about software. Mostly, however, he’s serious about making money – which is why Ellison’s OpenWorld keynote surprise in San Francisco on Sunday was a whole new machine: the Exalytics in-memory appliance.

Exalytics is based on Oracle’s Sun Fire X4470 M2 server, which debuted at the end of June. A four-socket box based on Intel’s ten-core “Westmere-EX” Xeon E7 processor, it crams 1TB of DDR3 main memory and a mere six disk drives into a 3U rack chassis. The X4470 M2 is a perfectly respectable and competitive Xeon E7 server – but that’s not what makes it an Exalytics appliance.

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