It is aimed at customers who are running older hardware under their Oracle databases and want to make an upgrade, as well as consolidate many smaller databases, including from third-party vendors, on a single platform.

Oracle is using a "pay as you grow" pricing model for the systems. Customers can start out by licensing software for two cores, adding more up to the 24-core limit as they need to, Oracle officials said. They will also be able to move over their existing database and RAC licenses if desired.

"We're trying to increase our target market with this," Hurd said. "So we're trying to package it in the most attractive way we possibly can."

However, it will not be possible for customers to chain together multiple database appliances. If additional power is desired, they will have to move up to the , Mendelsohn said. List pricing for a quarter-rack system starts at US$330,000 with support and other costs bringing the price significantly higher.

The 12TB of storage on the database appliance works out to a maximum database size of 4TB once triple mirroring is factored in, Mendelsohn said.