Ellison did not provide pricing information for the system, and it was not immediately clear when the product will be available, but more details could come this week at OpenWorld.

One major difference between Exalytics and HANA lies in the hardware strategy, as customers can choose from a number of different hardware vendors who are partnering with SAP to sell HANA as an appliance.

"Oracle's in-memory play validates SAP's innovation in this space and efforts to redefine and simplify the technology stack," SAP spokesman James Dever said via e-mail. "It will be telling to see their true commitment to in-memory, which challenges Oracle's bread-and-butter relational database business."

Meanwhile, Ellison did not discuss another that will apparently be called the Big Data Appliance. That product, which was on display outside the OpenWorld keynote hall, will involve the Hadoop open-source framework for large-scale data processing as well as NoSQL database from Oracle, according to a description card.

While Oracle's rivalry with Hewlett-Packard has heated up in recent months, Ellison reserved the trash talk on Sunday for IBM.