Those systems "made a strong contribution to our growth in Q4," Oracle President Mark Hurd said in a statement. "Today there are more than 1,000 Exadata machines installed worldwide. Our goal is to triple that number in FY12."

Exadata is facing competition from the likes of IBM and its Netezza division, as well as SAP, which has rolled out the HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) in-memory computing engine. In-memory computing places data to be processed into RAM, giving a performance boost over reading off disks.

Oracle plans to announce an "in-memory accelerator" for Exadata, as well as a "big data accelerator" involving the open-source Hadoop programming framework, at its OpenWorld conference later this year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call Thursday. More specifics weren't immediately available.