Oracle yesterday afternoon wheeled out "the world's first" OLTP Database Machine based on so-called FlashFire solid-state disk SSD technology from Sun.

It's supposed to be the fastest computer on the planet for both data warehouses and OLTP.

It's supposed to break the I/O bottleneck by processing a million IOPS in a single cabinet thanks to the flash storage and, bottom line - according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison - "IBM has nothing like it."

Neither, he says, does Teradata or Netezza or, for that matter, any of the start-ups that have sprung up. They're all OLTP-challenged.

The widgetry - which consists of three basic building blocks: flash-based storage servers, Intel-based computer servers and Sun-designed InfiniBand - sounds terribly sexy.

It's supposed to handle more than 10 times the data than anything around and users are supposed to be able to search that data 10 times faster without changing their applications. The proof, however, is in the pudding. Ellison claims to be installing Exadata machines in Teradata's largest accounts.

The Sun Oracle Database Machine is referred to as Exadata Version 2, and is described as "hardware by Sun, software by Oracle."

Oracle's only experience with hardware to date is its year-old Exadata product, which uses preconfigured HP servers for high-performance data warehousing. It's been speculated that Sun equipment could be used to replace HP's and it has. (Told ya so. Told ya so.)

During the webcast today Ellison made it sound like the HP gear was still around, labeled Exadata Version 1, although he obviously put a bullet in the HP relationship. The Sun machine's reported performance, double the HP box on data warehousing, blows Version 1 out of the water.

"Exadata V2, he said, "runs virtually all database applications much faster and less expensively than any other computer in the world."

And what do you know but buried deep in an Oracle FAQ was the news that the HP machine, which Larry called one of Oracle's most successful products ever, is dead. It can't even be attached to the new gismos. Users can, however, upgrade to the newer software.

Compared to the V1, the Sun widget has 60% faster Nehalem CPUs, 50% faster disks (600GB SAS disks at 6 gigabits/second), 200% faster DDR3 memory, 125% more memory (72GB per database server), 100% faster networking (40 gigabits/second InfiniBand) and a raw disk capacity of 100 TB (SAS) or 336TB (SATA) per rack. The faster interconnects and faster disks contribute to the performance.

The InfiniBand switches are Sun's own, according to Sun EVP John Fowler.

The software is Oracle's Database 11g R2 and its Exadata Storage Server Software Release 11.2. The optimized 11gR2 is supposed to be faster than any specialized in-memory databases.

The addition of a so-called Exadata Smart Flash Cache based on the FlashFire technology is credited with delivering the machine's extreme performance and scalability. See, database processing is done in the flash storage.

There are four preconfigured Exadata 2 models immediately available: a full rack (eight database servers and 14 storage servers), a half-rack (four database servers and seven storage servers), a quarter-rack (two database servers and three storage servers) and a basic system (one database server and one storage server). Pricing starts at $110,000 and runs to $1.15 million.

IBM charges $10.7 million for its fastest computer, performance Oracle claims it can match with two Exadata 2 racks for $2.3 million.

A full Exadata 2 rack includes 64 cores, 400GB of DRAM and 5.25TB of flash storage.

The widgetry, according to Ellison, is infinitely scalable on-demand. You just keep adding racks and, according to Larry, don't need a cloud. Oh, and everything is redundant, fault tolerance being an IBM failing.

The timing of the announcement suggests that Oracle moved it up from Oracle OpenWorld scheduled for mid-October.

It's Oracle's way of thumbing its nose at the European Commission, whose investigation of the MySQL side of the proposed Oracle-Sun merger is holding up Oracle's acquisition schedule and giving Sun rivals like IBM and HP a bigger opportunity to run off more of Sun's business.

It's widely thought the probe is less about MySQL's future than it is a protectionist exercise. SAP, Oracle's great rival, is after all a German company. The US Justice Department didn't get its knickers in a twist about the deal.

The announcement is also Larry's way of hugging Sun's defecting customers and warding off IBM and HP rampages.

Ellison said he wanted Sun's hardware for Oracle appliances when Oracle said it would buy Sun back in April. A lot of people didn't believe him.

Oracle is doing all the support for the Exadata 2.