Oracle and Intel Join Hands for Cloud Computing at OpenWorld

Oracle is teaming with Intel to accelerate enterprise adoption of cloud computing.

News of the partnership came at the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco. The idea is to make enterprise cloud computing more secure and efficient and to drive the development of standards that enable flexible deployment across public and private clouds.

In particular, Oracle and Intel pledged to collaborate with each other as well as other vendors to expand standards that enable portability of virtual machine images, such as the Open Virtual Machine Format. They also plan to help create Web services standards for provisioning and management of cloud-based services. 

Cloud computing has become a reoccurring theme at the conference. On Monday, Oracle announced it will allow customers to license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware to run on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). 

According to both companies, enterprises are already running applications on shared infrastructure within their firewalls using Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) and Oracle Grid Computing technologies. With this as a foundation, enterprises want to create private clouds for internal applications as well as have the ability to securely extend them to public, multi-tenant clouds without sacrificing flexibility.

For Intel and Oracle, meeting the needs of mutual customers pursuing cloud computing requires the vendors optimize their respective technologies for each other. As an example, the companies reported the collaboration between the two on Oracle VM and the Xen open-source hypervisor with Intel VT yielded a 17 percent performance boost for the Oracle database running virtualized on Intel Xeon processors.

“Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based,” said Robert Shimp, group vice president of the Oracle Global Technology Business Unit, in a joint statement.