Oracle goes all in on Private Cloud - at Cloud Expo New York

In the program for the Cloud Expo, Microsoft has an advertisment which says it's "All in" for Cloud Computing. But in the Oracle opening keynote, given by Richard Sarwal and Hasan Rizvi, Oracle has shown that it's "All in" for Private Cloud.

The overall goal, as articulated by both Oracle speakers, is to provide an enterprise ready Private Cloud environment.

They described a stack of WebLogic Server and Tuxedo, both leveraging Coherence cache-management, powered by JRockit and HotSpot, and managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager. All of this sits on Oracle Enterprise Linux or Oracle Solaris, which in turn runs on Oracle VM. With this, they said, "Oracle has delivered the Foundation for PaaS". Rather than an enterprise constructing a similar stack on top of an IaaS infrastructure, there is "less to build" by using such a PaaS infrastructure. Both speakers spoke of the benefits of this, in terms of shared pre-built services for security, identity management, and "all the abilities" including scalability and availability. They didn't elaborate on the identity services, but clearly a Security Token Service would be one example.

Two significant announcements were (a) a way to run WebLogic right on the hypervisor which "will take the OS out of the equation" [though a cut-down OS will still be used, for process and thread scheduling and for networking], and (b) the "Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder" which is a GUI environment for creating applications leveraging this PaaS infrastructure. [ Additional note: William Vambenepe has more on these two announcements in his blog post ]

In the spirit of "eating our own dogfood", they gave examples of internal Oracle usage of Private Cloud infrastructure for development and Oracle University internal training (though they acknowledged that this usage has been called "server farms" and "grids" thus far).

And what about Storage as a Service, which many of see as an obvious Cloud play for Oracle? Hasan Rizvi noted that "we know a thing or two about data management", but didn't elaborate...