Enterprise Cloud Computing Blog

"Cloud in a Box" Gets Boxed In

Posted by John Considine on Sep 22, 2010 at 2:35 PM

By John Considine

Just a week after our blog post on the telcos, we find another big company joining the cloud computing tsunami – Oracle’s announcement of its “cloud in a box” offering as well as new offerings of Oracle software running on Amazon’s EC2.

For a company whose leader shunned the term “cloud” last year, this is a lot of cloud announcements in one week.  Oracle’s new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is perhaps the first Sun-Oracle-in-a-box“cloud in a box” solution that is actually delivered in a box (of hardware).  Unlike the offerings we have seen from Eucalyptus, Nimbula, Azure, and VMware, the Exalogic product contains the control software as well as the hardware components to make a virtualized resource pool.  The other vendors have focused on delivering a software solution that can be combined with the users’ choice of servers, storage, and networking gear to build a cloud.

Oracle, powered by Sun’s server and system technology, has decided to deliver a complete cloud solution that contains up to 360 CPU cores, 2.8TB of RAM, and 40TB of storage in a single rack of equipment.  This big box is reportedly priced at just over $1M.  Oracle’s motivation for this box is to deliver on the promise of building an entire stack of both hardware and software that has been engineered to work together to deliver better performance, reliability, and scale.  Overall, the Exalogic system has impressive performance characteristics and may be a great solution for data center consolidation, but…

Placing the term “Elastic” in the name of this offering is stretching the accepted definition of the term as it relates to cloud computing.  The Exalogic server is a contained set of resources that is purchased, operated, and maintained as part of the enterprise infrastructure.  You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased.  While you can add more racks to the solution, you are stuck paying for the whole thing independent from what you really use – not exactly elastic or pay for only what you use.  My only other problem with Exalogic is the range of supported operating systems – we like the Linux and Solaris support, but a quote from Rick Schultz of Oracle – “There is no demand for Windows at the moment” – makes me wonder who they are talking to.  More than half the enterprise workloads CloudSwitch has deployed to the cloud are Windows-based; how can there be no demand for Windows in Exalogic?

The other interesting difference in the Exalogic solution as compared to the big (public) cloud offerings is the design center for the hardware.  Clouds like Amazon and Google were developed around “stripped down” servers to act as generic compute components.  The redundant components normally used to improve the reliability of a server are removed from the compute nodes to reduce the component cost, and software and other application-level techniques are used to make up for the fail-able components.  Each of the servers in the Exalogic solution has redundant power supplies, 2 solid state disk drives, and redundant Infiniband controllers.  This more expensive hardware allows the system to survive component failures with minimal disruption to the running applications – a traditional enterprise infrastructure design, with high reliability to support a lot of VM’s packed on a single piece of hardware. 

The difference between the two approaches highlights the upcoming battle between architectures in the cloud – stripped down commodity servers versus highly available high-end servers as the basis for cloud computing.  The early leader in this space is the commodity server approach because of the types of applications initially targeted to clouds – stateless horizontally scalable web applications.  But as we start putting more core enterprise applications into the cloud, the HA architectures become more interesting, and thus we expect this architecture to gain ground.  We see these architectures gaining ground already with clouds like Terremark, BlueLock, and Savvis.

The other announcement this week from Oracle is expanded support for running Oracle software in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.  Oracle has provided templates (AMI’s) in Amazon for its database software since 2008, and this week they have expanded the number of applications they will support in Amazon to include Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle Linux.  In addition to expanding the software supported on AWS, Oracle has taken the step of “certifying” the software for operation in Amazon.  This means that customers can now get support from both Oracle and AWS for those applications.  Although Oracle’s lead cloud story seems to be about the Exalogic box, I believe that this announcement does more to advance cloud computing for enterprises.  Support for these key Oracle products in Amazon’s cloud adds credibility to public cloud computing, as it allows enterprises to really use the cloud for their core applications.  This is one of the areas that a cloud provider cannot fix, it is up to the software vendors to expand their horizons to embrace the cloud and Oracle is blazing the trail.

I think the only downside to the Oracle-Amazon announcement is the lack of integration with Oracle’s control software.  The FAQ’s from Amazon and Oracle emphatically state that the management controls for Oracle deployments to the cloud is exclusively the Amazon console and tool set.  This is a shame since we believe that seamless integration between the data center and the cloud is key to a successful enterprise cloud deployment; creating a disjointed environment just adds work with no value for the enterprise and ultimately leads to cloud lock-in. Our enterprise customers have told us consistently that they want a “single pane of glass” from which they can manage pools of resources both internal and external.

Finally, while I like the architecture of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and believe that it could form the basis of a new class of cloud computing offerings, it too may be missing a critical point.  If an enterprise decides to deploy their private cloud on this technology, there is no connection or relationship between the applications deployed to the private cloud and those running in the public cloud.  This, once again, highlights the importance of cloud federation – you will never break the cycle of buying more hardware and infrastructure if you don’t embrace technology that allows you to access the public clouds.

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7 comment(s) so far...

Reader Comments

  1. PSoft Search

    September 23, 2010 9:44 PM | Permalink

    Had read about the Oracle announcement about Exalogic and was wondering how a "box" could serve as a cloud?

    As you said, it cannot be scaled up / down when the requirement changes - one of the most important selling phrase of the Cloud.

    Also, the utility like payment won't apply as you are not essentially paying for what you use...

    Great article!

  2. Sankar Nagarajan

    September 25, 2010 3:09 AM | Permalink

    I think one of the interesting things as you have said "As we start putting more core enterprise applications into the cloud, the HA architectures become more interesting, and thus we expect this architecture to gain ground...."

    Enterprises are today are interested in or moving most of their Non-Core,Non-Mission critical apps and services to the cloud for various reasons pertaining to the HA,Reliability,Security and SLAs. Enterprises are especially expecting more rigor on the SLAs and ownership of liabilities and risks from Cloud Vendors for running their mission-critical businesses. Given this and the gap in the availability of such providers , it's perhaps a good strategy and a natural progression for oracle(+sun hardware) which has been powering mission critical business for thousands of enterprises to tap in to this niche space directly or indirectly in the market.

    Sankar Nagarajan

  3. Leon Katsnelson

    October 01, 2010 1:38 PM | Permalink

    To say that Oracle is stretching the definition of "elastic" is akin to saying that Titanic suffered buoyancy malfunction. Oracle Exalogic looks like large collection of IT resources in a box but there is not much that is "cloud" about it.
    http://freedb2.com/2010/09/23/oracle-exalogic-a-cloud-in-a-box-that-is-all-box-and-no-cloud/
    I am not arguing that it is somehow inferior technology; I am sure it will be well put together system that will serve some customers well. I just find bold red "Elastic Cloud" on the front of the Exalogic to be an insult to our collective intelligence.

  4. C. Scyphers

    October 01, 2010 2:14 PM | Permalink

    I'm going to take exception to your analysis, if you don't mind. You say "The Exalogic server is a contained set of resources that is purchased, operated, and maintained as part of the enterprise infrastructure. You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased. While you can add more racks to the solution, you are stuck paying for the whole thing independent from what you really use – not exactly elastic or pay for only what you use." So, how (exactly) is this different from any cloud platform?

    It seems to me Oracle isn’t marketing Exalogic to startups who want to host their environment on the cloud; rather, they are marketing Exalogic to large companies who want to provide their own internal cloud to host their own applications. Once you look at Exalogic from that perspective, then I find the criticism a bit blunted. Any cloud platform is going to be limited to the numbers of cores/RAM/storage available; within any cloud platform, you can scale up and down only within your available resources; if you need to add more capacity, you have to pay for the entire gamut of capacity you want to add, not what you actually use. This evolves into a somewhat standard capacity provisioning problem at this point, one of which can be simplified for some companies by the unified forklift install of Exalogic.

  5. John Considine

    October 01, 2010 4:57 PM | Permalink

    "So, how (exactly) is this different from any cloud platform?"

    This is very different from the cloud platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, Terremark, Savvis, BlueLock, Rackspace, GoGrid, and many others. With these cloud platforms, you only pay for what you use. When you want to scale up, you allocated more resources, and when you scale down, there is no more expense. You neither had to pre-buy the resources, nor pay for it after you were through using it. Your point about this evolving into the standard capacity provisioning problem is very much the issue. The cloud is offering a new perspective in the standard capacity provisioning problem; The standard problem, as you state is tied to making up front estimates and investment in the infrastructure for your business. You must over provision for day one because of the discreet size of the solution, and because you cannot afford the delays associated with upgrading the infrastructure. Then you have to carefully manage and distribute the resources and plan for and deal with the repercussions of variable workloads. Inevitably this means that you have to grow the infrastructure to support the peak of the peaks or you'll have to disappoint some aspect of the business.

    One of the very attractive aspects of "real" cloud computing is that you can break the cycle, and use only what you need when you need it. Do I think that all problems can be solved in the public clouds? No, but using them as part of your infrastructure can eliminate many of the pain points associated with standard provisioning problems.

    Also, I am not talking about startups with respect to elastic needs, at CloudSwitch we are integrating the cloud into enterprise data centers and supporting enterprise workloads.

  6. C. Scyphers

    October 01, 2010 5:52 PM | Permalink

    "With these cloud platforms, you only pay for what you use." Yes, but I am inferring the "you" in your statement to be the end user (i.e. the startup in my example). That's not what I'm talking about when I ask what's the difference. From Amazon's/Rackspace's point of view, they can only scale up/down in terms of their available hardware. *That* is where I think Oracle was attempting to market Exalogic. Not necessarily to public cloud providers (although I'm sure they won't turn down the sales) but rather to companies considering deploying a private cloud.

    Oracle (for better or worse) gives them the "one throat to choke" model that is very attractive to a lot of the buyers while lowering the risk profile of a deployment. A single forklift install and then it either works or it doesn't. If not, a single forklift withdraw and everything's back to the way it was.

    As an pseudo-apology, I in no way was trying to imply that clouds cannot support enterprise solutions: I mentioned startups because they're on my mind right now (several advisory boards). However, it seems to me the primary assumption in your discussion regards public clouds. I do not believe Oracle is particularly targeting public clouds. There are a number of organizations who will never, ever, under any circumstances avail themselves to the public cloud (governments as a quick example, other institutions who prize security to an exceedingly high degree).

  7. Leon Katsnelson

    November 01, 2010 3:50 PM | Permalink

    >There are a number of organizations who will never, ever, under any >circumstances avail themselves to the public cloud (governments as a quick >example, other institutions who prize security to an exceedingly high degree).

    News flash, US Federal Government goes all in with a public cloud strategy: http://freedb2.com/2010/11/01/us-federal-government-embraces-cloud-computing-in-an-unexpected-way/

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