Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has described the company's Exalogic Elastic Cloud appliance as "one great big honkin' cloud," but until now it has lacked crucial virtualization capabilities to split out the platform's storage and compute capacity in an elastic and automated way. On Wednesday, Oracle announced a second generation of Exalogic software that truly merits the "Elastic Cloud" moniker.
Exalogic is one of Oracle's so-called engineered systems combining hardware and software "engineered to work better together," but until now it has been more of an infrastructure appliance combining compute, storage, operating system, infiniband networking, and system management software. The benefit was being able to plug it in and quickly get to deploying applications on a high-performance, fault-tolerant platform.
Exalogic previously included a degree of virtualization capabilities, but with Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0, Oracle has added server-level virtualization capabilities that will make it much easier to spin up and spin down capacity at will.
"We now have virtual network-, storage-, and server-level capabilities through which we can create enterprise application environments in an automated way," Mike Palmeter, senior director of product management for Oracle Exalogic, told InformationWeek.
More to the point for Oracle customers, the Exalogic upgrade is built specifically to run optimized deployments of Oracle business applications, such as ERP and CRM systems and supply-chain management and other Oracle vertical industry applications.
With the new level of virtualization, Exalogic's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer can be used to spin up virtual capacity without having to know anything about the physical server, storage, or network capacity inside Exalogic. The IaaS layer also lets administrators automate detailed software, network, and storage configuration steps involved in deploying applications. Thus, you can take the entire software stack that used to be installed on physical servers and quickly spin up (or down) instances on Exalogic virtual servers.
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