This is a guest post from Larry Dignan of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Larry on his ZDNet blog Between the Lines, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Oracle chief Larry Ellison unveiled the latest version of its Exadata data warehousing appliance on Tuesday, and it’s clear the company plans on increasing its data warehousing push.

Ellison’s Exadata Version 2 launch had three primary goals:

The first Exadata machine was launched in partnership with HP. This go round Exadata was built by Sun Microsystems (statement). The move made sense given Oracle’s purchase of the company. The Exadata Version 2 launch also gave Sun executive vice president John Fowler an excuse to show off its the company’s FlashFire technology.

Oracle’s big sell is that Exadata Version 2 “was designed for online transaction processing and data warehousing,” said Ellison. Running online transaction is “something Netezza can’t do at all” and “something Teradata can’t do at all,” he added.

Ellison also added that Oracle is installing Exadata machines “within the Teradata installed base.”

 

As for IBM, Ellison said that Exadata 2 can do faster processing at a much lower cost than Big Blue. Ellison also knocked IBM’s fault tolerance and other features relative to the Exadata machine.

 

And.

 

The overarching message here is that Oracle plans to take Sun’s hardware business and create high margin specialized systems for tasks like data warehousing and data crunching.

Here are some selected slides from Ellison’s talk:

 

A look at the pricing information: