Cloud on demand with Exalogic

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud in his keynote speech at OpenWorld on Sunday. The private cloud system provides the customer with a ‘pay as you go’ type system - they can add virtual machines on demand when a greater capacity is needed. Under this cloud Java applications would speed up significantly – two million Facebook messages could be dealt with per second.

Exalogic has been compared to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service, in that it has similarities – something that Ellison has no problem with.

"Needless to say, Oracle agrees with Amazon.com on the definition of cloud," The key components being - virtualised, elastic and including hardware as well as software.

Ellison, on the other hand, was not so supportive of Salesforce.com – claiming a lack of virtualisation and elasticity, plus a jumbled customer database. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel was also announced, and highly recommended, over the current Red Hat version by Ellison. Oracle is still compatible with Red Hat but Ellison clearly feels they are lagging behind, by four years, even with Oracle support.

Oracle’s private cloud approach seems to have gone down well – even to one analyst who believed the Oracle cloud message to have been rather mixed up in the past.
‘I’m sure Oracle's very conservative approach will resonate with a lot of people because, while cloud computing started with a big focus on public clouds, much more of the focus is now on private clouds.’ Oracle’s vision is clear – and their cloud is clearly flying high.