No Hadoop news today from Oracle. Instead, Oracle announced a database appliance for the small and medium sized business market that integrates software, servers, storage and networking into one box.

In a live Webast, President Mark Hurd said the hope is to make Oracle Database appliance say for small and mid-size companies to enjoy the benefits that have come with Oracle Exadata. Oracle is trying to get more uses cases to use the technology in a way it has not been used before. He said this is Orace’s first entry with pre-engineered products. There should be more of this type of pre-engineered product from Oracle going forward.

No Hadoop news is not a surprise. It is expected Oracle will make a Hadoop announcement at Oracle Open World in a few weeks.

The appliance can manage any Oracle database. It is designed to pay as you grow with sub capacity licensing. You can start with two cores and pay incrementally up to 24 cores. No hardware upgrades required.

You can spin down the cores as well. Easy configuration is what Oracle is selling here. It’s Oracle hardware and software, all in one box. They cited the complexity with other vendors that comes with scaling up and down in cores. Oracle says this problem is alleviated with the appliance.

Highlights:

• The Oracle appliance leverages existing databases. No new certification is required.
• The box is pre-configured. It allows for what Oracle says is an easy installation.
• The appliance can scale from two cores to 24 cores.
• The appliance can manage OLTP or data warehouse environments. It can run any data workload up to the limits of the box. You can run a lot of databases or just a few. If you need more, customers can go to Exadata.
• Oracle states its simplicity is in it single vendor environment.

Services Angle

The appliance is sold with services. Small and medium-sized customers will need to understand how to best use the more robust capabilities that the appliance provides.

We did not hear a peep about Hadoop. This is a standard Oracle product, vertically integrated for the business that manages its own IT. It stands in some contrast to IBM and SAP that are starting to focus on a more distributed approach. We should see more news about Oracle’s data analytics approach in a few weeks at Oracle Open World.