The big announcement
After one works out how to do high-bandwidth physical I/O (Exadata) the next steps are to increase the methods available to avoid physical I/O. Exadata has some I/O elimination capabilities in the Storage Index feature which is code that executed entirely in the storage servers. So, having said that, the next way to avoid physical I/O is to have massive cache. But where? The X2-8 model finally supports 2TB RAM now that it is based on the E7 Xeon and supports larger DIMMS. So where would it be?
Your guess is as good as mine, but I'll go ahead: The big news will likely be servers connected to the infiniband fabric but *not* a part of the Real Application Clusters cluster. They will serve the sole purpose of caching data.
That's just a guess.