Oracle Partner Provides Cloud-Based Apps

An Oracle solution provider has combined the vendor's applications with storage from Pillar Data into a cloud-based solution that provides virtualized application hosting and disaster recovery.

The result is an integrated, scalable cloud computing offering for high-performance serving of the Oracle applications, said Chuck Egerter, president of Eagle Business Solutions, the Clearwater, Fla.-based solution provider that designed it.

Eagle's "Solid Cloud" makes it possible to offer Oracle applications-as-a-service similar to the ASP or SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, but does not limit customers to a specific application, Egerter said.

The idea for turning the Oracle application into a cloud-based offering came from existing customers who had worked with Eagle to host their applications on dedicated servers which had their own direct-attach storage, Egerter said.

"So customers had dedicated storage," he said. "This was easier to do initially, because of the lower cost and the fact that we weren't sure how big it would get. But it got to a point last year when we needed to go to the next level."

At that point, it made sense for Eagle to add a SAN in order to improve storage efficiency, which it did with the help of Pillar Data's Axiom storage systems, Egerter said. The company also added Oracle VM server virtualization software to make it easier to work with multiple customers.

"We wanted to let customers run a variety of applications, centered around Oracle, but others as well," he said. "But we're not like a traditional ASP. We let customers run their own apps."

Pillar Data's guarantee for certain levels of performance, utilization, and system availability makes it easy for Eagle to base its Oracle application cloud technology on that vendor's storage, Egerter said.

San Jose, Calif.-based Pillar Data is Eagle's only storage vendor partner, in part because of the scalability of the vendor's architecture, and because of Eagle's close ties to Oracle. Pillar Data's primary investor is Tako Ventures, the investment arm of Larry Ellison, president, CEO, and chairman of Oracle.

"It's another way for us to get into the door," Egerter said. "We found that Oracle and Pillar Data help each other. We've gone into accounts and talked about Pillar, and turned it into an Oracle opportunity, and vice versa."

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