If you can use 168TB of storage, then Oracle may actually be the low-cost option (for now), working out to $14,000 per terabyte. According to Ellison, Teradata's closest-equivalent system costs $35,000 per terabyte, while Netezza charges about $29,000 per terabyte for its 10100 system. Even Greenplum charges $20,000 per terabyte for its systems, according to Yara.

What do experts and users think about the new gear?

"Oracle Exadata Release 1 is hardly going to put Teradata, Netezza or Greenplum out of business," wrote analyst Curt Monash. "Medium [to] long term, the Exadata technical strategy could work very well. Exadata storage management addresses some of the problems with shared-everything. Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) addresses other, and it may not take many releases before Oracle gets query parallelization right as well."

Database consultant Peter Scott enthused in his blog, writing, "For strange people like me, people that see the world as moving large amounts of data around, it was exciting news."

On the other hand, Tim Hall, a U.K.-based Oracle database administrator, said he was "a little underwhelmed by the keynote yesterday."

"I'm sure there are many positive points about Oracle Exadata Storage and HP Oracle Database Machine, but it all seems a little irrelevant to me," blogged Hall, citing the product's price tag and ultrahigh-end capabilities. "For me, this is like discussing the merits of a Lamborghini when I'm actually going to buy a Renault Clio."

Christo Kutrovsky, a database administrator at The Pythian Group Inc., thinks the biggest plus of the Database Machine is the fact that it comes preconfigured and pretested for top performance. "Ninety percent of the problems I've seen are due to improperly configured systems," he wrote. "Using Exadata necessarily and immediately solves all of these issues."

"From the DBA perspective, it's heaven," Kutrovsky wrote. "No arguing with storage people for dedicated spindles, no arguing with CIOs about big vs. small disks, no arguing with systems administrators for ASM [automatic storage management]. No hiring of expensive consultants to 'tune' the system or apply best practices. You may laugh at all of the above issues, but many shops are exactly like that. Especially the big ones (the target market for Exadata), where everyone is too afraid to change anything in case they get blamed if it doesn't work. The 'best practices' are the only practices with the Database Machine."

Will the Database Machine or Exadata Storage Server ever run operating systems other than Linux?

Yes, said Ellison, though he gave no timetable.

What type of customer would buy these Oracle products?

Monash said that both Oracle products will make most sense for the types of enterprises that traditionally buy Oracle, not Web 2.0 start-ups, which will presumably continue to flock to MySQL and other free, open-source databases.

Are these really Oracle's first hardware products, as Ellison proclaimed?

Technically, yes. But as anyone who was around the dot-com era recalls, Ellison used Oracle as his bully pulpit to pitch the Network Computer, a Web-based thin client that was supposed to replace the Windows PC. Ellison eventually spun the Network Computer out of Oracle into a start-up called New Internet Computer that was to make and sell the $199 devices. The device failed, but thin clients are making headway today.