EMC is buying Greenplum and its data warehousing widgetry, which means it’ll be competing with Oracle’s pet Exadata widgetry, not to mention Teradata, Netezza and the other famously data-inclined.

In fact, EMC is going to use the privately held Greenplum to start a new data computing products division under Greenplum CEO Bill Cook that is expected to make more acquisitions and add in-house developments. Cook, an ex-Sun exec, will report to Intel defector Pat Gelsinger, the prime mover behind the acquisition who’s now president of EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.

And to top it off they got former Sun chairman Scott McNealy, who sits on Greenplum’s advisory board – Sun used to sell Greenplum’s stuff – to bite the hand that wrote his Sun buy-out check – under the circumstances still a nice chunk of change – and wax eloquent in the EMC-Greenplum announcement about how “EMC’s strength in the enterprise and Greenplum’s push to fully transform data warehousing and business analytics, makes for a perfect fit” and how “together they are brilliantly bringing together the power of cloud computing, virtualization and social collaboration to help customers as they venture into the next phase of computing and business analytics.”

No Larry Ellison lapdog he. EMC says McNealy will remain an unpaid advisor.

Greenplum’s shared-nothing, massively parallel, scale-out technology has been used lately for self-service analytics and has recently been positioned as a key enabler of “big data” clouds – a word that’s not really in Larry’s lexicon.

Greenplum also happens to use a virtualized x86 infrastructure, a happy coincidence considering EMC also happens to own the lion’s share of VMware and happens to have its own virtualized private cloud infrastructure in Vblock, the pre-integrated concoction of Cisco networking, VMware virtualization and EMC storage.

Greenplum – which is based on a version of PostgreSQL its own mother wouldn’t recognize – is supposed to be capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software at a dramatically lower cost.

Data-driven outfits like Nasdaq OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media use it to try to make sense of the massive amount of data they’ve got and can only look forward to getting more of.

IDC predicts that over the next 10 years the amount of digital data created annually will grow 44 fold.

EMC is supposed open more doors for Greenplum. It means to continue to supply Greenplum’s product portfolio and plans to deliver new EMC reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software appliance designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.

EMC hasn’t said what it’s agreed to pay for Greenplum, other than that it’s paying cash. GigaOm says it heard from sources that EMC is paying upwards of $300 million. Greenplum raised $61 million in three rounds. The third round two-and-a-half years ago ironically included Sun and SAP Ventures. SAP, of course, in trying to close on its acquisition of Sybase.

Microsoft bought into Greenplum’s first round back in 2000.

Greenplum says it was in fund-raising mode six or eight weeks ago when the call from EMC came. EMC reportedly reviewed its other options but stuck with the devil it knew. The pair has been selling together for the last year.

Greenplum, on its own a software-only solution, will tell you that Oracle’s Exadata, whose pipeline Larry said last month is approaching $1 billion, is based on 20-year-old rack technology; Netezza is proprietary; Teradata wasn’t figured out analytics yet; and HP Neoview is a non-starter.

Greenplum, on the other hand, fits into Gelsinger’s overarching cloud-based vision of separating data from storage to create vPlex virtual storage and moving the data around the globe by building worldwide federated storage employing distributed cache coherency, resolving the twin problems of bandwidth and latency. Everyone everywhere basically gets immediate access and updates don’t send the master data into an out-of-sync befuddle.

The EMC-Greenplum deal should close this quarter. All of Greenplum’s 140 people will be going over.

See http://www.beyondvc.com/2010/07/emc-buys-portfolio-company-greenplum-more-behind-the-story.html to hear from one of Greenplum’s VCs.