In a twist of fate, Oracle announces the Exalogic private cloud appliance at this week’s Open World event. Exalogic is meant to run as a scalable application-tier server that naturally tandems with Exadata storage servers. This is a great move as Exadata is selling well ($1B in pipeline revenue). An Exalogic appliance runs Solaris/Linux and includes the following:
- 30 servers with 360 cores
- 960GB of SDD
- 40TB Storage
- 4TB Read Cache
- 72GB Write Cache
The appliance will start at $1M plus maintenance, so it is obviously targeted for bigger enterprises, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.
This is an interesting development as it signals Oracle’s product entry into cloud computing, a business and computing model that can fundamentally change how hardware and software is purchased. As Oracle has the lion’s share of the existing enterprise database and application server market, they have the most to lose with any shift. It also represents a big turnaround from when Larry Ellison explained “Why He Hates Cloud Computing”.
So, why is Oracle jumping into Cloud Computing now? I think they’ve realized that being on the bandwagon allows them to define the emerging market. This is supported by the slide below (from Larry’s keynote) where CC is defined very narrowly as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In the PaaS model, the Exadata and Exalogic products are potential building blocks that they can sell.
What does this mean for the Philippines?
I doubt that local enterprises or local PaaS providers will shell $1M (P45M) for a highly scalable cloud application server appliance like Exalogic. At a starting price of $1M (P45M), that’s already an entire local data center with half a dozen racks. To further put that amount into perspective, that single appliance, if purchased by a local SaaS/IaaS provider like IPConverge, will already consume 11% of their recent IPO Listing.
Oracle’s move is still worth noting though as an example of how even the most reluctant of enterprise software leaders are jumping into Cloud Computing.