Oracle Makes Major Cloud Computing Announcement at OpenWorld

By: Talha Bhatti  |   October 5th, 2012   |   Business, Gadgets, News

The Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of enterprise software developer Oracle, Larry Ellison has made public his company’s intentions of launching a cloud computing service. Many see this as Oracle stepping into direct competition with Amazon, which has seen a great deal of success with its own cloud computing service.

 

The announcement was made in San Francisco during the OpenWorld conference with Ellison stating that Oracle will be offering “hardware as a service” in the very near future.  The revelation that Oracle is stepping into the cloud game is interesting because Ellison had been famously noted as claiming that cloud computing is “complete gibberish.”

 

It seems that Oracle and Ellison have warmed to the cloud, seemingly going all in on cloud computing and offering a plethora of packages including software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service. Oracle’s has two versions for its brand new IaaS cloud, a service where the customer rents the hardware, creates their own architecture and installs their own software. The first is the “public cloud”, an option whereby the consumer uses Oracle’s Data Centers to offer compute services and storage services.  This is very similar to the model in use by Rackspace, HP and Amazon. The second version is the Oracle Private cloud. In this set up the Public Cloud is copied onto a data center owned by the customer. Ellison explains further by saying that, “We own it. We manage it. We upgrade it. You only pay for what you use.”

 

Oracle will be joining stalwarts HP and IBM in offering private cloud service to customers. However, Oracle claims that its solution has an advantage over the competition because it offers the identical hardware and software as its public cloud. That means customers with private clods from Oracle get to utilize Exalogic and Exadata computers that have been custom built for Oracle software.

 

Ellison also broke some other major news at the OpenWorld Event. He revealed that Oracle had invented a new database they call Oracle 12c. This database was made specifically for the cloud and allowed different users to utilize one database maximally. Oracle also announced the release of Exadata x3. This piece of hardware would be going up directly against SAP’s HANA database. Ellison claimed the new device was bigger, faster and cheaper than their rivals’.

Source: Business Insider