Oracle has launched the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack designed to store massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is a cost-effective way to add extreme performance storage servers to an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, said the company.

Data that could be stored in the Rack include historical relational data; backups of Oracle Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files.

Standard Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack configurations come with 96 Terabytes to more than 3 Petabytes of Raw Disk Storage using only the included InfiniBand switches.

Over 10 Petabytes of user data can be stored using the Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression which is included. The company said that the Flash PCI Card Capacity ranges from 1.5 TB to 47 TB is also included.

The Intel Xeon CPU processing power in the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers range from 48 CPU Cores to more than 1500 CPU Cores.

Oracle said that the new Rack has complete redundancy built in to support the demands of critical applications including redundant 40 Gbps InfiniBand connectivity.

Each server also features hot-swappable disks, power supplies and fans for high availability.

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) dynamically and automatically balances the data across Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. It also provides disk mirroring to protect against disk failures, loss of data and safeguard data accessibility, said the company.

Oracle Database Server Technologies senior vice-president Andrew Mendelsohn said organisations today are continually challenged with managing and storing the explosive growth in both structured and unstructured data.

Mendelsohn said, "By combining leading, industry-standard servers and storage hardware from Sun with the intelligence built into Oracle software, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack allow customers to achieve unmatched data scalability, capacity and reliability."