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The battle for control over analytics platforms in the enterprise intensified this week with Oracle rolling out an upgraded version of the Oracle Exalytics platform that provides access to twice as much memory in addition to 2.4TB of solid-state drives (SSDs) and 5.4TB of hard disk storage.
According to Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine X3-4 is designed to address the analytics needs of organizations that require up to 2TB of main memory complemented by additional SSD and magnetic disk storage.
Rodwick says there is plenty of relevant data that organizations want to analyze that does not need to be stored on the most expensive main memory or SSD resources. That message, says Rodwick, is resonating with customers who have made the Oracle Exalytics platform the fastest selling Oracle engineered platform in the company’s history.
According to Rodwick, what ultimately differentiates Oracle’s approach to data analytics is the level of automation using policy-based tools that Oracle is applying. The system is designed to allow organizations to easily scale the amount of data they need to analyze without necessarily having to hire additional database administrators to manage it.
As part of that effort Oracle is also making it easier to integrate Exalytics with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Essbase OLAP applications.
There’s no doubt there’s a war on between Oracle, SAP and a host of other platform providers that are vying for control over analytics workloads that are among some of the most important and fastest growing in the enterprise. In the case of Oracle, the company is trying to leverage the inside track provided by the company’s long history with DBAs who are often charged with managing analytics workloads. Whether Oracle can fend off its rival vendors remains to be seen, but one thing that is for certain is that Oracle is determined to make sure that if they do lose business in this area it won’t be for the want of a credible analytics platform.
