Oracle enters into cloud hardware with Exalogic
Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison announced Exalogic, a private cloud server, at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday.
The Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine follows on from 2008's Exadata machine, which also combined hardware and software and, like Exadata, is optimised for Oracle's own software. Exalogic is designed for a range of cloud uses from small-scale applications to "the largest and most demanding enterprise resource planning and mainframe applications", Oracle said in a white paper (PDF). The system is available in Linux and Solaris variants.
Exalogic puts Oracle into a new area of competition with IBM, HP, Cisco and other providers of integrated hardware and software cloud products.
Exalogic Elastic Cloud fuses software and hardware for heightened performance. Screenshot: Oracle
"Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a complete system of servers, network, storage, VM [virtual machine], operating system and middleware, all engineered to work together," Ellison said in a statement.
The system integrates with Oracle's existing major hardware device — the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which Oracle launched in partnership with HP in 2008, before its relationship dissolved around the time of Oracle's acquisition of Sun. In Oracle's most recent earnings report, Exadata was picked out as a key profitmaker in its hardware portfolio.
For software, Oracle's entire Fusion Middleware portfolio has been optimised for Exalogic deployment, with optimisations and enhancements specifically made to the Oracle WebLogic Suite.
Each fully scaled 42 rack unit (42U) Exalogic rack can support 360 64-bit, x86-based 2.93GHz Xeon cores, distributed across 30 individual nodes. Each node is configured as a server containing 12 cores; two boot solid-state drives (SSDs) that also retain diagnostic reports and handle local data swapping; dedicated power supplies and InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters to plug into the overall rack. Each node is hot swappable, so hardware problems can be dealt with without shutting down the entire rack.
Up to eight fully sized Exalogic or Exadata racks can be connected up together with the InfiniBand framework before customers need to invest in extra networking switches, Oracle said. Oracle is also selling quarter racks (96 cores) and half racks (192 cores) as well.