Oracle Corp startled many people at its Open World conference by announcing 2 hardware products developed in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Co. The products were said to be designed to render high performance for data warehousing applications. This is Oracle first direct venture into the hardware market. HP would make the line of data warehouse application computers and Oracle will market them under its own brand. The products that were released in the Open World conference on 24th were the HP Oracle Database Machine, which are pre-configured server racks including Oracle software and the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server, which are HP ProLiant servers.
Exadata
The company claims that the storage server was designed to push data more quickly to the databases by pairing Intel multicore processors with memory. The Exadata Storage Server includes a dozen disk drives and two quad-core Intel processors that are used to perform database query operations on the storage equipment itself. This would increase the performance by ten fold, Oracle claims.
The Linux version of the Database Machine would be available immediately but support for other operating systems is yet to come. The Exadata Storage Server will work with “any Oracle database server” meaning existing customers using older versions of oracle do not have to migrate to the new version of Oracle software.
Joking about the storage capacity, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison quipped, “This is 1,400 times larger than Apple’s largest iPod.”
The Database Machine is priced at $4,000 per terabyte of storage, plus the database license cost, Oracle said. The systems can be ordered from Oracle, which will be responsible for sales and support. HP will handle the delivery and servicing of the hardware.
Teknovelo 
it looks to be bundled offerings is the way forward for many tech companies ..
Interesting read! Looks like most of the hardcore s/w companies are venturing into the hardware market. Awaiting the competition analysis.