With the newest addition to its engineered-systems family, the Exadata X3 Database Machine, Oracle is giving customers more justification to realize they need to move beyond the traditional and non-optimized systems of the past.

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The products involved are the already familiar engineered appliances Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and the SPARC SuperCluster, an appliance running Solaris 11 on up to 16 SPARC processors with eight cores each.

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In his most straightforward comment to date on the power that comes from optimizing hardware and software from the ground up, Ballmer sounds a lot like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who launched the the engineered-system concept about four years ago with the first version of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

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However, if the new Oracle 8i database would run on a non-NT machine that allowed users to connect to the database using the proprietary interface they are used to, it would be very interesting to MDS, he said.

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Dr Dean inspired a huge grass roots network online and then turned the database into a dollar donating machine.

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When the customer has used up all 100 keys in the database, he goes to a secure ATM-like machine that takes more laser readings at different spots and transmits the keys to the database.

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