Oracle introduced its first converged infrastructure system Tuesday – a one-rack integrated solution that includes servers, networking and storage, virtualized on Oracle VM.

This is a major step for Oracle, whose hardware play to date has been focused on "engineered systems," or appliances the company designs specifically to support its software solutions. The converged-infrastructure market is a busy one, with major players like HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC, NetApp and Microsoft, among others, fighting tooth-and-nail for raised-floor space in enterprise and provider data centers.

The centerpiece of the solution, called Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, is the company's new software creation called Virtual Appliance Controller. It interacts with the Oracle VM Manager and the intra-rack interconnect technology to automate VM provisioning and configuration of the network that ties resources in the rack together.

Adam Hawley, senior director of product management at Oracle, said the compute piece is delivered by Sun servers with Intel's eight-core Intel Xeon processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. The base configuration includes two of the servers, but it can be expanded up to 25 nodes.

“All of these servers are all connected through the networking infrastructure that's included,” he said.

Through the Oracle Virtual Network Fabric Interconnect (technology Oracle got through last year's acquisition of Xsigo), all servers are interconnected using InfiniBand. The InfiniBand protocol, however, is translated to Ethernet, so the servers and the VMs running on them treat the fabric as an Ethernet one, while using the 40Gbps speed InfiniBand offers.

There are two Oracle ES1-24 Ethernet switches used internally to manage the servers, as well as InfiniBand switches. The appliance has 10GbE connectivity outside of the rack.

The solution comes with the Sun ZFS 7320 storage appliance with redundant controllers and 24 disk drives. Net storage capacity is about 6TB.

According to Hawley, however, Oracle expects most customers that buy the appliance to use it with external storage. That is why the appliance supports NFS and iSCSI storage and will work with NetApp and EMC storage arrays.

This is what sets the appliance apart from some of the competitors in the converged infrastructure market, Hawley said. Vblock, the collaborative solution by Cisco, EMC and VMware, is limited to EMC storage, and FlexPod, a reference architecture by NetApp is only compatible with NetApp storage products he said.

Oracle's appliance comes with VM templates for all major Oracle business-software products. It will support any other vendor's applications equally well, however, Hawley noted.

It also supports a number of operating systems, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris or Microsoft Windows Server, he added.

Hawley referred to the Xsigo software used to configure the network within the appliance rack as a Software Defined Network (SDN) technology. While the rack comes with all the cabling plugged in, with all fabric configuration done through software, these capabilities cannot be extended outside of the rack, he said.

The solution does not support OpenFlow, the popular SDN standard.