Flash in the Oracle Exadata V2

There is an interesting piece in the hardware description as mentioned on the FAQ page of the Exdata system:

2 quad-core Intel Xeon E5540 (2.53GHz) processors 24GB memory
4X96 GB Sun Aura Smart Flash Accelerator F20 PCU cards
Disk Controller HBA with 512MB Battery Backed Write Cache
InfiniBand Connectivity Dual-Port QDR (40Gb) InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter
Power Supplies - Dual-redundant, hot-swappable
Remote Management Sun Embedded Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM)
Disk Drives 12 x 600 GB 15,000 RPM SAS.

The flash drive isn’t in the disk slots, it’s on this cards. Thus each of the cells comes with 384 GB of flash. You don’t have to sacrify space for speed here. Neat.