According to Richard Sarwal, SVP Product Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle will support cloud computing as an enterprise grade offering, whether private or public. He shared this information with Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chairman Jeremy Geelan in an interview published in Cloud Computing Journal. Sarwal describes the role of middleware in cloud computing, detailing how application grid’s automation and dynamic capacity adjustment are primary enablers of cloud architectures.

Geelan asked how Oracle's grid computing offerings are being extended to embrace the Cloud, and Sarwal responded by saying, that Oracle continues to refine Real Applications Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and Enterprise Manager Grid Control, giving the company a full stack of grid products from storage and infrastructure up through databases and middleware that are all managed in an integrated fashion by Oracle Enterprise Manager.

"Oracle's emphasis on Grid Computing capabilities such as dynamic resource provisioning, dynamic resource scheduling and highly automated management of clusters and virtual machines map directly to the requirements of Cloud Computing," Sarwal said, adding that Oracle's grid computing products provide the key building blocks for Cloud Computing. In Sarwal's view, cloud computing offers advantages not only to the enterprise-scale user but to small and medium businesses (SMB) as well.

Sarwal also touched on Oracle's collaboration with Amazon Web Services in the licensing of Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), noting that similar collaborations are underway with other cloud service partners.

Oracle's help is sought by enterprises seeking help in transforming their current infrastructure to make it more cloud-like, more agile, flexible and efficient, Sarwal continued. "Providing customers with a ready-to-use private cloud solution is therefore a priority area for us. We want to provide customers a complete solution that enables them to deliver cloud like services within their data center - including self-service provisioning, chargeback, policy-based QoS management, etc.," he said.

On the subject of virtualization and Oracle's role there, Sarwal said, "Oracle is uniquely positioned to provide customers with integrated clustering, virtualization and management solutions for deploying a complete application stack either in a physical or a virtual environment, including clouds. Only Oracle combines the benefits of server clustering and server virtualization technologies to deliver a complete Grid Computing infrastructure." Therefore, he added, the recent acquisition of Virtual Iron to Oracle's virtualization portfolio was an important addition.

Virtual Iron helps Oracle provide better management of both virtualized and clustered environments, Sarwal maintained, noting that, "Virtual Iron complements Oracle VM by providing dynamic resource management to optimize server capacity and power consumption. Customers will get faster application deployment, streamlined VM configuration, improved visibility and control across Oracle's enterprise software stack, and improved ability to meet service levels for virtual environments."

In support of Oracle's commitment to enterprise-grade cloud computing in both public and private form, Sarwal outlined a three-pronged strategy: offering offer customers a growing number of SaaS applications; providing our enterprise grade software platform to other cloud providers to enable them to build, deploy and manage their cloud offerings; and giving customers the choice of deploying Oracle technologies in either private clouds or public clouds such as Amazon. "One of our big areas of focus is to help enterprises build private clouds using the rich capabilities of the full Oracle stack," he said.

More Information

Architectural Strategies for Cloud Computing Oracle White Paper

"Cloud Storage for Cloud Computing" - white paper sponsored by the Open Grid Forum and Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)

Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), Version 0.8

Why Businesses May Find Subscribing to the Cloud Beneficial

Sun Exec Sees Many Customers, Many Clouds.

Cloud Security Presentation at the 10th Annual CERIAS Symposium [...read more...]

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