Oracle OpenWorld kicks off with “one big honkin' cloud”

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud was the centrepiece as chief executive Larry Ellison kicked off the company's OpenWorld conference.

The Elastic Cloud is Oracle's entry into private cloud provisioning. It is a modular system containing 30 servers each running two, six-core processors giving a total of 360 cores. Infiniband is used to interconnect the servers and to link with storage arrays.

The systems are supplied with Solaris or Linux operating systems and, according to Ellison, provide all of the middleware required to run applications across the cluster.

"It's a cloud in a box that you scale from a quarter rack up to eight racks as a cloud. That's one big honkin' cloud," he said.

He went on to claim that a single module can execute a million HTTP requests per second. As an example, he said that Facebook's HTTP load could be handled by just two Exalogic cloud systems running in tandem.

At one point he cited Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as being a good example of cloud technology because, like Exalogic, it is elastic, virtual and you only pay for what you use. He then added that EC2 was a public service but Exalogic runs behind an enterprise's firewall.

"It's a comprehensive development and execution environment that can run all your applications including Oracle's own Siebel, E-Business Suite and upcoming Fusion Applications," he said.

After singing the praises of Exalogic, he announced the availability of Fusion Applications. This is a project first announced in 2005 just after the company bought PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. The products were slated to appear in 2008 but were subsequently delayed.

Oracle Fusion Applications comprise over 100 modules in seven different product families targeting areas such as financial management, procurement and sourcing, human capital management, customer relationship management, and governance risk and compliance.

A short demonstration was given but Ellison said more would be revealed at Wednesday's keynote.

Before his opening keynote HP's Ann Livermore, executive vice president of Enterprise Business, mended a few of the bridges that Oracle's hiring of ex-HP chief executive Mark Hurd had damaged. She pointed out that Oracle and HP have many shared accounts before a demonstration was given of HP's Oracle database applications.