Oracle has picked up the pace lately by churning out a string of new products for both customers and industry partners.
Last week the Redwood City, Calif.-based IT giant launched two new services, Database Backup and Storage Cloud, for its Oracle Cloud store. A few weeks earlier, Oracle introduced versions of its main database and most of its middleware for use on Verizon’s growing cloud; an adapter for Salesforce.com apps; and completed a deal for Microsoft to sell Oracle cloud services on the Windows Azure cloud.
In February, Oracle saw that it required a key cloud app for marketing support, so it bought BlueKai to fill the need.
The latest bit of news is Oracle’s Virtual Compute Appliance, released April 16 and designed to work with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and the 12C database (separate purchases). Oracle claims that the appliance in conjunction with the other components enables rapid, repeatable software-defined infrastructure deployment for “virtually any x86 application and workload.”
Oracle positions the Virtual Compute Appliance X4-2 as a “wire-once” engineered system that comes fully assembled and is ready to run production workloads with software-defined configurations.
It also is designed as a turnkey solution for flexible private cloud platforms that can be used with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to deploy cloud services ranging from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Database as a Service (DBaaS) with features such as automated provisioning, elasticity and cloud governance (showback, quota, access controls).
The appliance is able to run Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, other Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows side by side. Customers can consolidate multiple applications onto one platform using the product.