Oracle At Cloud Expo: Keep Cloud On 'I.C.E.'

That was the message hammered home by Oracle's Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of product development, in his keynote address to kick off the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Monday in New York City.

Sarwal said it's all about the ability to isolate workloads in tandem with consolidation while providing the elasticity needed to make cloud solutions and applications mobile and always available. Relying on I.C.E., he said, dispels the common misconception that cloud computing and virtualization go hand-in-hand.

"Can you do any of these without virtualization? Of course you can," he said, later adding, "Virtualization is part of the cloud, but it really is not the cloud."

And as cloud computing continues to evolve, Sarwal said he sees private clouds dominating as it grows out of siloed physical and static environments into elastic self-service clouds.

"Private clouds are going to be, for the foreseeable future, the most commonly deployed in enterprise IT," he added, noting that one of Oracle's goals for the cloud is to offer a platform that is enterprise ready and can be leveraged privately by enterprises or by public cloud providers.

"Private clouds are an area we are putting a lot of focus on," he said.

Another strong area of focus is metering and chargeback in the cloud, which have become more important as cloud applications and systems become more complicated and sophisticated.

Meanwhile, consolidation and virtualization are being leveraged to boost utilization, but the systems are still complex, said Hasan Rizvi, Oracle senior vice president of product development.

Next: Oracle Offerings Deal With Cloud Complexity Oracle, Rizvi said, is charged with helping users deal with sophisticated and complex applications on a shared resource.

To do so, Rizvi on Monday revealed two new Oracle offerings: one that offers a better virtual environment to run Java applications, another creates a harmonic convergence between the various components needed to deploy complex, multi-tier applications.

First, Oracle's new WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option gives the ability to run WebLogic on a hypervisor while eliminating the need to run an operating system. The offering combines Oracle's WebLogic Server with the JRockit Virtual Edition, meaning the WebLogic Server can run directly on an Oracle virtual machine or hypervisor offering better utilization, up to 33 percent more transaction throughput compared to running with an operating system and improved security as it eliminates the OS-based vulnerabilities and the need to patch them. Rizvi added that it helps applications run faster and eases deployment as well, as all WebLogic apps now run more transparently.

Oracle also launched the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a design tool that examines and considers all of the individual components that play into a multi-tier Java application deployment. Basically, Virtual Assembly Builder can connect and deploy various appliances to create multi-tier applications. Rizvi codifies the components like the Web tier, database tier and application tier and ensures their relationships are such that the application can be deployed as needed.

"Now you have metadata that says these are the relationships of these components," Rizvi said.