Oracle joins private cloud market

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced his company’s entrance into the cloud computing business on Sunday at OpenWorld with a newly integrated hardware and software system.

Dubbed the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the system combines 30 six-core servers connected by Infiniband networking and is compatible with the Exadata Database Machine. The systems support both Solaris and Linux guest operating systems and include the other Java Oracle middleware products.

“Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a complete system of servers, network, storage, VM, operating system and middles, all engineered to work together,” Ellison said. “This delivers stunning results, including the fastest Java performance, elastic capacity on demand and a completely fault tolerant system.”

Ellison said its Exalogic was built on the same premise as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, which allows users to run applications on a virtualized infrastructure that can shift resources based on demands.

Some people in the IT industry have accused Oracle of being hostile toward the cloud. However, cloud computing has been a central focus of this week’s OpenWorld conference. Oracle also unveiled its latest version of the Exadata Database Machine X2-8 storage system.