Oracle Cloud Time Frame

Oracle revealed that its new Public Cloud will be open for business “sometime next year,” and it probably will have to be sooner rather than later, considering all the competition already in place. The Oracle Public Cloud will offer companies a centralized way to obtain integrated cloud-supported applications and infrastructure for data centers.

The Open Data Center Alliance announced it is collaborating with The Green Grid to align their institution of data center power/cooling standards. Utilizing the ODCA’s Carbon Footprint usage model and TGG’s Carbon Usage Effectiveness metrics, the collaboration aims to reduce carbon emissions within data centers. Initial work is targeted for completion in the first half of 2012.

Generally, large enterprises are deploying new—or new instances—of internal and external applications in their clouds and keeping legacy apps on existing—still often siloed—systems. Startups and midrange-size companies are following the same pattern.

Even though clouds have been up and running for several years in many enterprises, the first jobs done on them are nearly always back-tier testing and development projects. Production workloads invariably come afterward. This agenda has been this way from the beginning and isn’t expected to change for a long while.

Generally, when cloud applications are used in production, the first ones implemented are the ones employees and contractors use internally throughout an enterprise, such as email, human resources, social networks (such as Chatter and Yammer) and collaboration tools (such as SharePoint, Box and Google Apps).

“Bursting” is the dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand. Turns out such big spikes in data flow or queries are few and far between and often predictable. These are not a top-of-mind concern for data center managers at this time.

Applications that will be used permanently within an enterprise are the most likely to be used in a new cloud deployment, including email and collaboration tools, human resource tools and information, file storage, social networks, marketing and internal customer information. Temporary applications, such as trial software, are much less likely to be housed in a cloud.

This one is a natural for most enterprises: More and more companies are moving their killer apps—email and collaboration tools, and social networking—to public cloud deployments on data center hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoGrid and Amazon.

In his keynote on Nov. 8, Rackspace CTO John Engates told his audience just that, claiming, “The cloud isnt quite ready yet. Engates declared that “infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] is only a bridge between today’s not-quite-ready-for-prime-time SaaS market and a utopian future where almost all software is delivered as a service.” He also harangued Oracle as being the poster child for old-fashioned, noncloud, shrink-wrapped, legacy software.

Newcomers Interxion and CoreSite, which announced a cloud computing alliance in June, demonstrated at Cloud Expo their capacity to address demand from cloud companies looking to collocate in both European and the U.S. data centers. The alliance aims to minimize the risk and challenges associated with international data center sourcing between Europe and the U.S., providing a cloud-optimized network access environment.