Oracle traps its cloud inside own tin boxes

Oracle is throwing one stone at two birds troubling its business: cloud and falling server sales. That stone: cloud in a box.

The database giant has announced Oracle Cloud at Customer, a package of its publicly available, but relatively unwanted cloud software - in its reciprocally related servers.

The stone has a name: Oracle Cloud Machine.

President of product development Thomas Kurian revealed Oracle Cloud Machine today, boasting it would run exactly the same APIs as the Oracle public cloud.

The big difference is you can install Oracle’s cloud software behind your firewall, in your data centres, rather than going public.

Oracle is, of course, trailing Microsoft – whose Azure cloud is already offered in tin boxes from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell.

Kurian said today that Oracle Cloud at Customer and Cloud Machine are his company’s answer to customers who’ve wanted to use Oracle public cloud but couldn't – those being organisations prohibited by regulatory reasons.

The reality is, however, that Oracle’s public cloud is lagging not just AWS by workloads, features, data and market share but also Microsoft’s Azure.

And it's no secret that, despite analyst and vendor hype, those customers loving AWS pushed for any reservations will quote regulation and data security – hence the refusal of private cloud to die and for the opening of regional data centres by the likes of, yes, Amazon.

Oracle’s server hardware business, meanwhile, is faring badly. How badly? Server revenue fell again in the last quarter, by 13 per cent to $1.1bn for the last three months.

That’s a business Oracle spent $8.5bn buying in 2008.

So what's the cloud bait Oracle’s throwing at its customers this time?

Oracle Cloud at Customer lets you run Oracle’s infrastructure and platform as a service in your data centre on the Oracle Cloud Machine. That machine comes with Oracle’s Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Java Cloud Service, Integration Cloud Service and Database cloud service among other Oracle offerings.

That means app elastic compute and block storage, virtual networking, file storage, database management and application development.

What we are talking is software defined, storage and compute with Oracle stressing that its box automates the cloud set up and management.

You can also boot clouds running on Oracle Linux, Red Hat, Windows and other operating systems.

Cloud Machine comes in three flavours – 288, 576 and 1080, with 2TB, 4TB and 7.5TB storage respectively – and has Intel x5 cores – note, not Oracle/Sun Microsystems’ Sparc. There’s local SSD and NAS and 10GB Cisco switching. It will, Kurian promised at a corporate event on Thursday, fit in your data centre just like any standard rack.

Also announced today were cloud services offerings: CX Cloud – CX for experience; supply chain management; enterprise resource planning and enterprise performance management as a cloud; and human capital management cloud. ®