Oracle Introduces Exalogic at Oracle Open World 2010: New Cloud System in a Box

Oracle understands the importance of cloud computing down the road. The company CEO Larry Ellison announced a new system that enables enterprises to run their own cloud in a self-contained system.Oracle’s new cloud entry is an integrated hardware/software box dubbed Exalogic Elastic Cloud that Ellison introduces at keynote address opening the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 at San Francisco on Sept. 19.

The cute box has the joint Sun and Oracle logos and it  features 30 servers with 360 cores, as well as networking and storage. The other interesting part is Oracle’s own virtual machine (VM) technology and two guest operating systems—Solaris and Linux. In fact, the complete unit of software in the Exalogic system includes the core Exalogic software, the operating system, Oracle’s JRockit and HotSpot, and WebLogic and the Oracle Coherence caching solution.

Ellison also showed benchmark results in terms of performance and it shows that the Exalogic system improves 12 times in Internet applications performance. The system can support more than 1 million HTTP requests per second. “That means we could handle Facebook’s traffic on two racks.”  Additionally, Ellison said the Exalogic system showed a 4.5 times improvement over previous systems running messaging applications which means that the system can handle 1.8 million messages per second.

“Simply put, Oracle’s Exalogic box gives you capacity on demand because you’re still buying more capacity than you need. It’s a nice box, but to the IT buyer Exalogic may not be all that elastic when it hits your budget,” Larry Dignan of ZDnet commented.

The CEO said Exalogic is “the fastest Java performance, elastic capacity on demand and a completely fault tolerant system.” Ellison started his keynote speech by saying what cloud means to Oracle. He continued that Salesforce.com is 10+ year-old software–as-a-service (SAAS) technology. He believes that Amazon.com is a true cloud platform because it is a standards-based application development and execution platform.