Oracle announces enterprise cloud appliance

Oracle has pre-intergrated hardware and software to make an appliance that creates infrastructure-as-a-service clouds within an organisation's datacentre.

The Oracle Optimised Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, announced on Tuesday alongside similar technology announcements from HP, fuses Sun blade 6000 modules equipped with Xeon processors; the Solaris or Linux operating systems; the Sun ZFS storage appliance and Oracle's own virtualisation software, Oracle VM to create a pre-integrated appliance for private clouds.

“Oracle is radically simplifying cloud deployment with a pre-tested, single vendor solution for enterprise cloud infrastructure,” Ali Alasti, Oracle's vice president of hardware development, said in a statement. "By engineering our hardware and software together, the Oracle Optimised Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure cuts deployment time from weeks to hours and helps customers get virtualised infrastructure up and running faster.”

Oracle believes the product will be useful for enterprises keen to build internal infrastructure-as-a-service clouds so that workloads can be provisioned, scaled and managed across fleets of virtual machines.

Rattling HP's cage

However, HP which also announced expansions to its similar CloudSystem appliance on Tuesday, disagrees with Oracle's perception of the usefulness of the Optimised Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure.

"What Oracle announced today, from our interpretation, was a foundation that supports infrastructure-as-a-service," HP's Steve Dietch, vice president of its cloud solutions and infrastructure division, said at a press conference on Tuesday. "What we saw from Oracle this morning is that it's based on Oracle technology — only Oracle technology — including Oracle virtual machine."

Oracle did not disclose pricing for the device.