Dell, EMC Offer Pre-Configured Oracle Data Warehouse

Dell and EMC are offering a package of hardware and software pre-configured to run an Oracle data warehouse, thereby reducing the complexity of deploying the data store for business intelligence.

The combined product, unveiled Tuesday at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, uses Dell's PowerEdge rack server and EMC's Clariion CX4 networked storage system, which includes virtual provisioning and flash storage.

Oracle software completes the deal with its related database software, real application clusters and partitioning. The Dell PowerEdge R900 comes with four quad-core Intel Xeon 7400 series processors and the EMC CX4-960 storage array supports from eight to 10 terabytes of data.

The benefit of the latest offering is in simplifying the deployment of a complex data warehouse system, the companies said. "With these new optimized Dell-EMC configurations, customers can leverage pre-installed, pre-configured solutions to help reduce the purchase cycle and streamline data warehouse deployments," Mike O'Neill, VP of Technology Alliances at EMC, said in a statement.

The Dell-EMC partnership stems from Oracle's recently announced Optimized Warehouse Initiative, which combines the company's data warehouse software with hardware and software from computer and storage vendors. The initiative reflects the emerging interest among BI customers in data warehouse appliances that deliver high-speed data mining at lower hardware and implementation costs.

Appliance vendors, such as Teradata, Infobright and Netezza, offer products that would compete with Oracle's partner-driven products, but also have the advantage of having only one vendor responsible for the entire package.