Oracle Enters Private Cloud Arena with One Humongous Cloud
Chris Kanaracus reports in his September 19th article in Computerworld entitled Ellison ‘announces one big, honkin’ cloud’ that Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, is ready to take on the likes of IBM and Hewlett Packard in the private cloud computing marketplace with one monster of a system. As I have stated in the past, hardware is not my field of expertise. Usually the time when the people in the room start talking about stringing servers together and processing cores is the time the paramedics are called as I curl up in a ball on the floor gasping for air. However, this new system, entitled Exalogic Elastic Cloud, is too good to pass up and not bring to my reader’s attention. There is a tie-in to software applications of course. I will try to hit the salient points, but I highly recommend Kanaracus’ article to fill in the certain gaps that I will create.
Exalogic will comprise:
· 30 servers
· 360 processor cores
· Interconnected via Infiniband
· Supporting both Solaris and Linux, and
· The ability to string more Exalogic machines together for even more power
Ellison boasted that a single set-up can handle 1 million HTTP requests per second and two systems running together can handle all of Facebook’s HTTP requests.
In his article Kanaracus contrasts the two types of cloud computing. There is the Salesforce model which concentrates on just a couple of applications, allowing for some add-ons to these core apps. Then there is the Amazon model which runs apps “on top of an virtualized pool of infrastructure that can shift resources in response to demand.” Kanaracus quotes Larry Ellison as accepting the Amazon model when he states his belief that cloud computing “is a platform. ... on which you run standards-based software. … It’s a comprehensive development and execution environment that can run all your applications." Exalogic is meant to run behind the firewall in contrast to a public cloud.
Oracle views the Exalogic system as a means to consolidate applications and fits into Oracle’s approach of selling integrated systems consisting of hardware with the software, especially after its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
