The Oracle Database Appliance is "exciting stuff," and brings "the benefits of Exadata to entry-level systems," co-president Mark Hurd said during a webcast event Wednesday.

The hardware component of the appliance will be sold separately at a list price of US$50,000 for a that includes two Sun Fire servers, 192GB of main memory, 24 processor cores, 12TB of raw disk storage and 292GB of solid-state disk.

"Everything is fault-tolerant and redundant," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle server technologies. "It's quite an amazing engineered system," and something midmarket customers could never create on their own, he added.

The appliance runs "pretty much" the same software stack as found on Exadata, including the 11g database, RAC (Real Application Clusters) clustering software and Oracle Linux, although the Exadata Storage Server software isn't a component. It also features Appliance Manager software that provides automatic monitoring and patching. The system "even calls [Oracle] support if you have a hardware failure," Mendelsohn said. "Before the customer knows it we'll have an Oracle technician out there fixing the part, and the customer may have had no idea anything failed at all."

Customers can get the appliance up and running in just a couple of hours, according to Oracle.