Oracle seems to be planning another Database Appliance

From Larry Ellison's comments it appears that Oracle wants to create a database appliance and own all the pieces. It definitely makes sense, Oracle has been delivering "Oracle Linux" for a while now, but Linux is still not in the same league as the Solaris operating system.  The majority of Oracle's enterprise customers continue to run on SUN hardware and the Solaris operating system even after IBM surpassed SUN in hardware capabilites and Oracle started pushing Linux. Here are some exerpts from the article this links to

    "We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business," Ellison told Reuters in an e-mail interview published late today. "If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones."
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    Ellison said he believes that by jointly developing Oracle's software with Sun's hardware and SPARC chips, the company can build machines designed for specific purposes that are better than ones pulled together from separate components.
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    "Once we own Sun, we'll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers," he said.