Larry Ellison – Opening Keynote of Oracle Open World 2010 – announcing Exalogic, the cloud in a box.

The first major keynote of this year’s Oracle Open World conference was last night – Larry Ellison announcing the Oracle Exalogic machine, the “cloud in a box”. A high end machine that is meant for consolidation (through virtualization) of many applications on a single piece of highly optimized infrastructure.

Here follows a rendering of the first part of Larry’s keynot, building up to the announcement of the Exalogic machine:

Cloud computing: many people use it for various things.

Many things, sometimes decades old, have been rebranded as cloud computing. Our definition of cloud computing. You can all have your own definition of course.

Cloud computing: platform to run everything on the internet (such as Amazon Elastic Cloud – EC2)? Or an application that runs on the internet -such as SalesForce.com (has been around for 10+ years, very successful). EC2 is not an application of course, a platform on which to run an application.

Amazon EC2 – popularized the term cloud computing. Includes hardware and software. You can build any application on that cloud. The technology is virtualized. When you use EC2 resources, you get some number of virtual machines. If you VM should fail, you do not impact any other virtual environment. Environments are isolated. Everything is in its own virtual machine or pool of VMs.

It is also Elastic: as you need more computing resources, you get them. Easily add more servers or virtual machines, as you need compute capacity. Dynamically. If you do not need it, you free up the VMs to put them back in the pool.

You only pay for what you use. That is Amazon’s compute cloud. Elastic, Virtual and Pay per Use.

Next, SalesForce.com. Two Applications running on the internet; it is not virtualized. It is the opposite. 100ks of customers co-mingle there data in a single database. GEs data is next to Siemen’s data. It is very weak security. It is not elastic. SalesForce.com is not elastic. Priced not on usage but on number of users. Call it cloud computing by all means, but remember that EC2 and SalesForce.com are very different.

Oracle’s definition of Cloud Computing is the same as Amazon’s. Cloud computing is about a platform, on which to run a wide variety of applications and tools. It must be virtualized and elastic, including both hardware and software.

Somewhat different take than Amazon: not just a public cloud, but also customers running private clouds behind the firewall, for that organization’s own needs. Same technology – software and hardware – as the public cloud.

The word is out: Exalogic. The cloud in a box. Oracle’s Application Server appliance. Hardware and software together to run applications.

WebLogic and the Exadata hardware combination optimized for running huge application infrastructures. 30 servers in a box, a total of 360 cores.

Infiniband network, H/A storage device. Includes VMs with guest O/S. 40Gb/s Infiniband network.

Secret sauce of Exalogic: the Coherence technology that makes 30 servers seem like single integrated memory. Exalogic has two guest O/S: Solaris and Linux. Runs JRockit Hotspot JVM and WebLogic application server. Specific optimizations to optimally benefit from the special hardware characteristics, especially to leverage the Infiniband connections – for example increase network package size – and flash memory.

Exalogic is Virtualized. Elastic: need more capacity? Add VMs . No longer needed? Return VM to the pool. Completely fault tolerant. It is a Scale out architecture.Just add more servers. Add servers, flash memory.

Fault tolerant: one fails, others keep running. Whichever component fails, the machine keeps running. It is secure: everything application running in isolated VM.

Exalogic connects to Exadata through Infiniband. They are designed to work together. Middle tier getting extremely fast access to the database.

Our hope: Standard Configurations: lots of customers run identical configurations. Advantage: if one runs into a bug, it can be preventively fixed for all other customers. Patching Exalogic: download one file and all software on the device is patched. That is important as patching is expensive, error prone and time consuming.

Run Facebook globally on two racks. 2 Milion messages per second. China Railway ticketing on one rack (even during Chinese New Year).

“If you want a platform to scale and be reliable, be willing to spend less! Exalogic 4X lower cost than IBM’s best.”

Exalogic scales – start at a quarter rack and scale as you need more capacity.

For more details, go to: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/exalogic/index.html

Note: other announcements in this keynote were the further unveiling of Fusion Applications, finally ready to ship (7 product families, 100 modules); Oracle Fusion Applications: the 5 year development project. An enormous engineering effort.

Also:  a new Oracle Enterprise Kernel for Linux: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel – Much faster than Red Hat. : UEK is optimized for use with Oracle products. Oracle’s Linux will offer choice of two kernels, a RHEL compat one and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. You will get Oracle’s, and community’s, enhancements faster via a more modern Linux (UEK).

Finally: to watch (an abridged summary of) the keynote presentation yourself, go to: http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/keynotes-143370.html