Oracle upgrades Exalogic Elastic Cloud

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has described the company's Exalogic Elastic Cloud appliance as “one great big honkin' cloud,” but until now, it has lacked crucial virtualisation capabilities to split out the platform's storage and compute capacity in an elastic and automated way, according to Information Week.

Exalogic is one of Oracle's so-called engineered systems combining hardware and software “engineered to work better together,” but until now, it has been more of an infrastructure appliance combining compute, storage, operating system, infiniband networking, and system management software.

The benefit was being able to plug it in and quickly get to deploying applications on a high-performance, fault-tolerant platform.

More to the point for Oracle customers, the Exalogic upgrade is built specifically to run optimised deployments of Oracle business applications, such as ERP and CRM systems and supply-chain management and other Oracle vertical industry applications.

The Exadata system is a database cluster running Oracle 11g and Real Application Clusters linked to Exadata storage servers, which have a hybrid columnar data store and flash storage to compress databases and speed up queries and data transfers inside the cluster, reports PCWorld.

The Exalogic Elastic Cloud machines run a tuned-up variant of the WebLogic application server on a cluster of x86 machinery, and an Exalytics appliance puts the TimesTen in-memory database on a single fat x86 node to chew through data at lightning speed.

The Exalogic middleware cluster takes the WebLogic Server and JRockit Java virtual machine, from Oracle's $8.5bn acquisition of BEA Systems in January 2008 and mashes it up with Coherence in-memory data-caching software, which it got through its acquisition of Tangosol in March 2007.