The technology, like other recent products from Oracle, is a tightly bundled hardware, software and appliance running an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop software, a new Oracle NoSQL database and an open source distribution of R for statistical analysis. The product is designed to work alongside Oracle Database 11g, its Exadata appliance and its new Exalytics appliance for business intelligence applications.

The Big Data Appliance represents Oracle's attempt to tap growing enterprise interest in tools for performing complex analytics on unstructured text data, weblogs, video files and social media.

Analysts believe that companies can gain significant tactical and strategic benefits from analyzing the data. But traditional database management systems, analytic products and storage mechanisms that are designed for more structured data have been to handle the new data types.

Over the past two years, several vendors have begun offering NoSQL and that are optimized to handle large volumes of unstructured data. Many of the products integrate new database and storage management technologies to enable more efficient management and retrieval of the data.

"Big Data is something that Oracle had to address," said Jean Bozman, an analyst with IDC. "It is a really exciting trend" that enterprises are beginning to embrace in a big way.