Oracle is going after its competitors with a new lineup of low-cost server systems that will rival the solutions offered by the joint venture between Cisco and EMC.
Speaking in front of reporters and analysts at a media event Wednesday, Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said that while Oracle previously focused on performance, the company will now compete on price. The event was held for the unveiling of Oracle's latest line of converged systems, the X5 line of "engineered systems," which combine servers, storage, network, and software.
"Home-built systems can be expensive; you have to do the integration and make it all work together," said Ellison. "Our strategy has always been to engineer all the layers - compute, storage, and networking - together, so you don't have to. However, we really never aimed at the lowest possible purchase price with our tiered systems."
However, with Oracle's fifth-generation hardware, the fourth line built since Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems five years ago, the software company hopes to appeal to customers who are wary of spending big money on the upfront costs of purchasing a server system. Ellison said Oracle's hardware translated into reduced operating costs in the long run but the company is still going after customers who purchase cheaper servers by the hundreds or thousands.
"We're going to compete for that core data center business," he said. "Our customers want their data centers to be as simple and as automated as possible. With some of Oracle's engineered systems and appliances, you can pay 50 percent less, but you have to be willing to take twice the performance."
For instance, the new Virtual Compute Appliance X5, which Oracle claims to provide a "complete converged infrastructure system" if paired with the FS1 Series Flash Storage System, costs $562,000 upfront and $22,000 for annual support. It comes with 27 Intel two-socket servers and two Oracle Virtual Network interconnects. The company claims the system can deploy applications in hours and reduce capital expenditures by half.
In contrast, an equivalent system from Cisco, the M4 Blade Server, is listed for $912,000 upfront and $26,000 for annual support, Ellison said.
Other members of the X5 lineup include the Oracle Database Appliance X5, Big Data Appliance X5, Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and Exadata Database Machine X5.
Asked for comment about Oracle's latest move, Cisco said it feels "pretty good" about its position in the server market and that Oracle "has a lot of catching up to do." Cisco also stressed that the company and EMC essentially created the market for converged systems. In a statement sent to Computer World, Cisco said some of its most valuable clients include IBM, Red Hat, NetApp, and Hitachi Data Systems, and they have made Cisco their "system of choice."
