Oracle Expands its Cloud Services with Elastic Compute and Storage Cloud

logo-WHIR

This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Oracle has launched a new set of Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings including elastic compute and storage, and it is expanding its Cloud Marketplace to include more partner-certified machine images of pre-configured applications and software that can be run on its IaaS cloud.

Oracle’s president of product development, Thomas Kurian, made the announcement this week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. “Oracle’s infrastructure services already power the Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle SaaS businesses and some of the world’s most recognizable organizations,” he said during a Tuesday keynote. “With this major update, Oracle is now making this same set of foundational Oracle Cloud infrastructure services—Compute, Storage and Network—available to its customers and partners.”

On Wednesday, Oracle announced its IaaS and PaaS services will be accessible through the Equinix Cloud Exchange in several Equinix data centers around the world.

The new Oracle IaaS services include Oracle Compute Cloud, Oracle Storage Cloud, Storage Cloud Archive Service, Oracle Network Cloud (which includes Site-to-Site VPN and its high-bandwidth data center/Oracle Cloud connection “FastConnect”), and Oracle Container Cloud (which supports Docker container deployments). IaaS is a long-awaited service for Oracle’s cloud services portfolio, which until now had included only Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service.

The Oracle Cloud will provide a broad portfolio of integrated services across applications, platform, and infrastructure. The Oracle Cloud Marketplace provides various third-party applications for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS layers, making it an attractive platform for systems integrators.

Some pundits have noted that Oracle’s IaaS elastic compute cloud happened nine years after Amazon launched its elastic compute cloud, EC2. But it’s also worth noting that Amazon began offering public IaaS cloud services years ahead of Google and Microsoft, which are now its biggest competitors.

An advantage for Oracle, however, is that it already has relationships with many large enterprises that it can leverage to gain IaaS customers.

On the topic of entering the IaaS market, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a keynote address that end-customers typically have to deal with different aspects of the cloud ecosystem – so that service providers who only offer IaaS are missing out on the big picture.

“We went into the SaaS business, and came to understand that required us to be in the platform business. And we went into the platform business and came to understand we had to be in the infrastructure-as-a-service business. That’s how we got to where we are today,” Ellison said.

He also noted that it’s unrealistic to assume that providing solutions for on-premise infrasturce is important because it’s unrealistic for all organizations to move all their applications to the cloud. “On-premises computing is not going to vanish. Even if on-premises computing eventually becomes a smaller piece of the pie than cloud computing, there’s going to be a long period of transition.”

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/oracle-expands-its-cloud-services-with-elastic-compute-and-storage-cloud