Even as cloud computing and the commoditization of the data center shift IT spending from physical infrastructure to software, Oracle is continuing to swim against the current with a level of confidence not shared by its traditional rivals, most of whom have already gotten swept up in the tide.

Both in the midst of a turnaround, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are actively trying to diversify beyond hardware in a bid to increase margins and become more competitive against emerging players threatening to disrupt their legacy revenue streams. IBM is taking the same route, recently axing a quarter of the workers in its Systems and Technology group and shortly thereafter selling off its low-end x86 server business to Lenovo in a $2.3 billion deal meant to free up company resources for more profitable businesses such as the Watson division that it established earlier this year.

Although it doesn’t quite fit the trend, Oracle’s best-of-breed approach is nonetheless paying dividends. The company’s hardware business soared nearly 10 percent in the third quarter, with its Exadata database and ZFS storage appliance lines showing particularly strong growth on the back of demand from large enterprise customers that opt to build on their existing infrastructure investments instead of committing to new technologies.

Oracle hopes to capitalize on that with ZS3-BA, a data protection appliance pegged as faster and more cost-effective than competing systems from EMC and NetApp.  The platform can back up as much as 26 terabytes of data and recover 17 in a just one hour, according to the vendor, which represents a 30 percent and an 80 percent increase over the previous generation, respectively.

“Oracle growing from a small base and stealing on-platform share. Oracle’s hardware business​(including Exadata and ZFS) grew 10 percent,” notes Wikibon co-founder and CEO Dave Vellante. “Oracle is buying share – which is smart and is very clearly going after some low hanging fruit – which is using ZFS appliance as a backup target – trying to displace NetApp.”

One of the main selling points of the ZFS series is out-of-the-box compatibility with other Oracle pre-integrated Engineering Systems, a benefit that was not coincidentally brought up in all three of the company’s latest customer success stories.  The vendor’s recent gains are a positive sign, but whether it will be able to sustain its hardware momentum in the coming quarters and, more importantly,  replicate that success with its emerging portfolio of cloud services still remains to be seen.

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