Oracle CEO Larry Ellison moves Oracle's cloud strategy into a new phase with a system that features hardware and software to run public and private clouds.
SAN
FRANCISCO-Oracle has announced a new system that
enables enterprises to run their own cloud in a self-contained system.
When
it comes to cloud computing, Oracle agrees more with Amazon Web Services'
definition than Salesforce.com's. That's why the company has announced its own
cloud-in-a-box system, known as Oracle Exalogic.
During
his keynote address opening the Oracle OpenWorld 2010
here on Sept. 19, Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry
Ellison announced the new system-the Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, or a "cloud
in a box," that is a system of "hardware and software engineered to
work together to run all your apps."
The
sleek-looking box sporting the joint Sun and Oracle logos features 30 servers
with 360 cores, as well as networking and storage. It also features Oracle's
own virtual machine (VM) technology and two guest operating systems-Solaris and
Linux. Indeed, the entire stack of software in the Exalogic system includes the
core Exalogic software, the operating system, Oracle's JRockit and HotSpot, and
WebLogic and the Oracle Coherence caching solution.
"The
Coherence software synchronizes the logic to create the illusion that there is
one central memory system," Ellison said.
Ellison
started his keynote striving to describe what the cloud means to Oracle. He
asked if it means what it means to Salesfroce.com, which he called 10+ year-old
software-as-a-service (SAAS) technology, or if Oracle's view is more in line
with that of AWS.
Never
one to be shy, Ellison ripped Salesforce.com as really being "one or two
apps on the Internet-sales and services apps. But it's really not a platform,
it is not virtualized; in fact it's just the opposite. It has weak security, it's
not fault-tolerant, it's not secure and it's not elastic."
However,
"Oracle agrees with Amazon.com," Ellison said. "We believe it
[the cloud] is a platform-a standards-based application development and
execution platform. It includes hardware and software. It is virtual and
elastic, and it runs a variety of apps."
However,
despite his praise and the fact that imitation is the best form of flattery,
Ellison admitted that Exalogic and Oracle's accompanying Fusion apps that will
run on it are specifically targeting AWS.
Thus,
the new Oracle Exalogic system has the fastest Java performance available,
Ellison said. It features elastic capacity, and it's fault-tolerant, scalable,
secure and easily maintained. It is so easily maintained that users can patch
all the software on the system by downloading one file from Oracle.
In
terms of performance, Ellison showed benchmark results that showed the Exalogic
system having a 12 times improvement in Internet applications performance.
Indeed, the system can support more than 1 million HTTP requests per second. "That
means we could handle Facebook's traffic on two racks." In addition,
Ellison said the Exalogic system showed a 4.5 times improvement over previous
systems running messaging applications, meaning the system can handle 1.8
million messages per second.
Moreover,
the Exalogic system costs less to run, he said. The system is faster and four
times lower cost than IBM's best server,
Ellison claimed. He said the Exalogic can scale to up to eight racks, whereas IBM's
top Power 795 system cannot.
In
another announcement, Ellison said Oracle has delivered a new version of Linux
that slightly differs from the Red Hat Linux system Oracle's existing offering
is based on.
"Red
Hat is four years behind the times with Linux, which is a huge problem for us,"
Ellison said. "We can't afford to be four years behind in software."
Therefore, Oracle is announcing it new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is
five times faster in some cases, he said.
Ellison
then preannounced a few other bits of news, including that Oracle will announce
a new online transactional processing (OLTP) machine on Sept. 20.
He
also noted that Joanne Olsen, who had recently been tied up in an employee
poaching lawsuit between Oracle and IBM,
will be heading up Oracle's new cloud services division. Olsen will address the
Oracle OpenWorld attendees later in the conference, he said. IBM
sued Olsen after she left the Big Blue systems giant and Oracle leveled its
own countersuit. However, the two companies settled their differences in
August. At IBM, Olsen had held the position of general manager of IBM Business
Continuity and Resiliency Services, among the many positions she held at the
company during her more than 30-year tenure there.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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