Oracle Takes Dead Aim At VMware’s Vision

Still wondering why Oracle purchased Sun?  Day One of Oracle’s OpenWorld 2010 cleared up at least one reason; Oracle has its own “stack” and it does not include VMware. 

When Sun was originally purchased by Oracle, my attention immediately fell to Sun’s virtualization assets and engineering talents.  Before the acquisition, Sun was amassing an arsenal of virtualization and management assets including xVM, VirtualBox, and Solaris.  If you factor in hardware development and JAVA, then Sun had everything they needed to “change the world.”  That is, everything except a track record for translating engineering into revenue.

Love him or hate him, Larry Ellison has no such issues.  His track record speaks for itself as Oracle has an uncanny ability to execute.  With the launch of Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, Oracle has signaled to the market that they are ready for a fight.  While most believe Oracle is gunning for Amazon Web Services, I believe hidden in their messages and jabs at IBM is their true target of public, private, and hybrid clouds ala VMware.

VMware unleashed their vision of the future at VMworld 2010 that included vSphere, vDirector, vCloud, vFabric, SpringSource, and more.  What’s missing?   Oracle would point to VMware’s ratio of vision to products, their lack of owning an operating system, and their dependency on third parties to deliver server power (I’ll give them storage as EMC is VMware’s parent company).  Oracle’s vision is unique in that they control the entire Cloud stack using proven technologies and deployments; unleashing the potential of Sun hardware, JAVA, and Fusion.

Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud has a few things going for it:

• Power – Scale Out and Scale In  
  Cores 96 to 2880, SSD 256GB to 7.7TB, RAM 768GB to 22.4TB, and SAS disk 40TB to 320TB
•  Applications – JAVA and Fusion
   Oracle’s Applications as well as others that run on Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux

Although, I’m not thrilled with Oracle’s reliance on InfiniBand, it makes sense given Sun’s product portfolio and expertise.  Also, we need to learn more about how you manage this system including orchestration via business process management solutions.  However, this is a great start for Oracle. 

One last thought, Oracle took a subtle jab at VMware, EMC, and Cisco when they proclaimed, “Run 1000s of existing applications” and “No Certification Required.”  Perhaps Ellison should not be picking a fight with Mr. Chambers at Cisco.  For the common denominator of vBlocks (VMware, xBlocks (Citrix), and rBlocks (Red Hat) is UCS and its momentum may be unstoppable.