Intel CEO Brian Krzanich (pictured) and Oracle CEO Mark Hurd used an Oracle Open World keynote to reveal Project Apollo - a combined attempt to transform enterprise data centres.

Krzanich said they have been talking and listening to the IT community, and the partners realise they need to make things easier, deliver higher performance, provide compelling experiences, and address security concerns.

Project Apollo is using the Oracle Cloud data centres as the basis for hardware and software optimisation.

Intel senior vice president and software and services group general manager said that just one month's actual work on tuning Oracle's software for best performance on the latest Xeon CPUs (as used in Exalytics systems) had yielded a 50% performance improvement, while variability was reduced from 30% to 3%. Taken together, these changes make it easier to achieve SLAs and reduce capital expenditure (by reducing the amount of hardware needed to deliver a certain level of performance) and operational expenditure (eg, less hardware means less power consumption).

The team is also developing a set of "blueprints" - sets of configuration and tuning information - to help customers optimise their systems, and work in this area is continuing.

IBM's way of doing data centres is "large and costly" said Hurd. "You can do better than this."

And to help organisations do better, Oracle and Intel are jointly running an 'Exa Your Power' program, which provides a free proof of concept for organisations thinking of switching to Oracle on Intel.

"Thousands of customers have made that move," he said. One of them moved from an IBM Power 7 system and found financial applications ran up to 15 times faster, the monthly close was completed one-third faster, and administration and support cost fell by 40%.

Krzanich went on to describe developments at Intel that will help revamp data centres.

He gave a live demonstration of Intel's forthcoming Optane SSD using 3D Xpoint memory, which will "unleash your CPU's performance." On one test, it provided seven times the IOPS with an eighth of the latency and 200 times less variability than a traditional SSD, making it "an improvement you can count on," he said.

Optane SSDs will ship in 2016.

Krzanich also showed "an early sample" of Intel's planned Optane DIMM, which promises DRAM performance with capacity at the cost of flash storage, "taking performance to a whole new level."

Data encryption and persistence will be built in, and it will be more affordable than today's DRAM, he said. "The separation between memory and storage will completely transform."

A functional prototype should be completed this year, but he did not indicate when it will go into production.

He went on to describe Intel's TAP (Trusted Analytics Platform) open source stack that provides a way of combining data sets from multiple sources

It is already being used in medical research, combining conventional medical and genetic data with that collected by wearable devices.

Being open source, it allows users to incorporate their favourite toolkits and custom-build methods, he said, but it provides sufficient analytics capacity for most users to not need to rely on data scientists or custom software.

On the security side, Intel's Reliance Point (part of TAP) is aimed at providing a way to make data available more widely (whether that is just outside the traditional silos within an organisation, or to a broader audience) while maintaining privacy and security.

This has particular relevance to medical research, as it provides an opportunity to combine data from around the world while preserving patients' privacy. This will change the way researchers look at disease and drug information, and provide an opportunity to unlock data.

In closing, Krzanich said "Intel and Oracle are committed to providing new solutions for those challenges."

Disclosure: The writer attended Oracle Open World as a guest of Oracle