Oracle Heads into Hardware and Cloud Computing

Officials at Oracle Corp. recently announced a plan to sell computer hardware for the first time. In other news, Oracle announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) to sell a data mart appliance, while Oracle's CEO announced his views on how Oracle gets involved in cloud computing.

Focal Points:

• Oracle recently announced that is was going to start selling two hardware products. The first, a "database machine," and the second, a smaller storage product, will both be manufactured by HP. The intention is for companies to be able to get access to information in the data center with a smaller footprint than is normally done with typical database configurations. The latter product has been in development for three years, will cost $650,000 and store up to 168 terabytes of data. Officials from Oracle said they plan on selling the appliance at a low price to undercut storage being sold by EMC Corp. and IBM Corp.
• The two hardware products are called Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server. The new Database Machine will fit in a single rack and can be ordered as a complete system that integrates a grid of Oracle database servers with a grid of the Exadata Storage Servers. Each Exadata Storage Server has two Infiniband pipes that deliver 1GB/sec of data to the grid.  Each Exadata Storage Server can hold up to 12TB of raw storage. This is a distinct change for Oracle, who has previously spent $35 billion to acquire 50 different software makers in the last four years. Oracle's profits last year rose by 29 percent to $5.5 billion.
• Officials from Oracle and Intel Corp. recently announced a joint effort to accelerate cloud computing for the enterprise. They said they intend to develop standards that will allow development across both public and private compute clouds. Oracle will leverage its Grid Computing technologies, while Intel will use its own Virtualization Technology. Officials from both companies said they would cooperate in three areas: efficiency, security, and standards. Security is a large issue, especially when companies are running software in public clouds. The companies plan on developing security standards that will allow private data to only be accessed by authorized people, and to improve activity tracking for auditing and compliance.

Experton Group believes Oracle's new appliances will be greeted with caution, as IT shops will want to ensure the appliances can work flexibly in a heterogeneous environment. Cloud computing is certainly going to grow, but it is likely to be used in limited roles, with a distinction between functions that are done internal to the enterprise and functions that are farmed out to external software as a service (SaaS) providers. IT executives should evaluate what functions make sense to establish for cloud computing, with a focus on specifying availability, performance, and security requirements.