Oracle CEO Larry Ellison laid out four key products in his opening keynote at OpenWorld this year. The announcements - all related to the cloud - include a new Oracle IaaS offering; the addition of an Oracle Private Cloud option; Oracle Database 12c; and the new Exadata X3.
Oracle will offer IaaS in addition to PaaS and SaaS, Ellison said. Oracle is offering IaaS as part of its cloud offering because customers that are running its SaaS applications and platform services have said they need to move certain kinds of custom applications and as well as other exisitng applications on to the cloud and the only way to accommodate that is to offer infrastructure as a service in addition PaaS and SaaS.
Moving on to the second major announcement, Ellison said a new Oracle Private Cloud as an extension to the Oracle cloud behind the customer’s own firewall to provide more flexibility to customers. “It is exactly the same as if you buy the infrastructure in our data center,” he said, adding, “We own it; we manage it; we upgrade it; you pay a monthly fee - and you only pay for what you use and, when we make an installation, we work with you to try to estimate the amount of usage and we install excess capacity beyond that estimate.”
With these announcements, Oracle is committed to providing services at all three layers of the cloud – SaaS, PaaS, and infrastructure, Ellison said, adding that because of Oracle’s experience in platform, service, database and middleware, the company is well suited to move that to the cloud and deliver the same set of industry-standard services that it delivers deliver on-premise.
Ellison’s third announcement was about a new version of Oracle database called Oracle Database 12c (with the c for cloud), which he described as “the first multi-tenant database in the world.” Planned to be available in 2013, it provides “a fundamentally new architecture” to “introduce the notion of a container database” with the ability to plug in multiple separate, private databases into that single container.
The database management system is responsible for keeping the separate databases separate and secure - not an application, he emphasized. Managing many as one provides operational, hardware and scalability efficiencies, and more importantly with multi-tenancy at the database level it provides security to go along with efficiency, he said. Oracle 12c is the foundation for an expanding cloud business at Oracle Corp. “It is the software foundation of the Oracle Cloud, multi-tenancy built at the right level,” he said.
And finally, Ellison said, the hardware foundation of the Oracle Cloud is the Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine featuring 4TB of DRAM and 22TB of Flash memory in one rack - and 10X database compression. “Everything is faster with the Exadata X3 and we consume less power.”
Ellison also announced there will be an additional, smaller configuration available for Exadata - the new Exadata X3-2 Eighth-Rack.
To access Ellison’s keynote, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4BPuQ0Da6k.