Oracle is preparing an on-premises version of its new Exadata cloud service.

Big Red recently introduced a cloudy version of Exadata, its dedicated database appliance which itself scored a new release.

The headline items in the seventh-generation appliance are the new Broadwell Xeons. Oracle's chosen the 22-core version to power the new machine. Also inside is support for eight-terabyte drives and Samsung's 3D NAND.

The former, says said Tim Shetler, a veep of product management for systems at Oracle, means Exadata is getting denser in a good way: bigger drives means you can get more database inside the box. The latter, he says, improves Oracle's tiering story thanks to its deep understanding of its own database and the ability to do tiering so finely that it can not only put a row into Flash but decompress it only when it lands in that storage tier.

Oracle's plans for an on-premises Exadata cloud follow the template for such appliances: make it look, feel and behave just like the cloud and sell it using pay-as-you-go pricing even though it lives in your own bit barn. Shetler also said Oracle is working on hybrid cloud use cases, although the main attraction of an on-premises public-cloud-like service is for those who need to be able to fondle their own data for regulatory reasons.

Shetler also remarked on Oracle's ongoing use of InfiniBand ,which Big Red's used since the first Exadata as the all-but-invisible-to-uers internal network connecting storage and servers. Shetler said Oracle is cognizant that Ethernet's getting faster and cheaper, and also that storage-class memory will mean redesigns for servers of all sorts. For now, however, InfiniBand is deemed well-and-truly sufficient. The technology's roadmap to 100Gbps will, he said, likely appear in the eighth-generation Exadata which will itself emerge once Xeons start using the Skylake architecture. ®