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September 28, 2008
What does Oracle cloud offering mean to the enterprise?

By Anand Ganesan | Filed under: AWS and Cloud Computing and JEE and Java and News and Oracle and Products

In this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle announced that its products can be executed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2, the cloud environment). Oracle products available for EC2 are mentioned below:

1. Oracle Fusion Middleware: Comprises of Oracle Weblogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit ( arguably considered to be the fastest JVM on the planet), Oracle Weblogic Operations Manager (a governance framework to manage multiple JVM’s across virtualized and non virtualized environment).

2. Oracle Enterprise Manager  (a solution to do incident and problem management, SLM, Release and Change Management)

3. All editions of Oracle Database i.e. higher than Oracle 9i Release 2, are available for deployment on EC2.

Oracle Open World Cloud Initiative 2008
What does this announcement mean to an enterprise? If an enterprise’s application infrastructure is based on Oracle products (mentioned above), then they can be migrated to AWS cloud environment.  Enterprises that use Oracle stack of products can do a prototype on EC2 without going through the usual time consuming processes associated with their enterprise or use EC2 for testing purposes. Enterprises can reduce their costs associated with data backup by leveraging Amazon’s S3, rather than backing up on a tape. Though Oracle and Amazon offer premium support services, note that Oracle does not offer support on issues arising out of Xen hypervisor (EC2 virtualization is based on Xen hypervisor), here’s where Amazon‘s premium support might help.

Oracle’s products are widely used in the enterprise applications however some features cannot be used when deployed on EC2. For example:

1. Oracle’s Real Application Clusters (RAC) cannot be run on EC2

2. Multicasting is not supported in EC2 environment, so Weblogic clusters cannot be executed.

3. Though Oracle has provided some Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s), however, these are not supported.

Note that the licensing/pricing is based on the size of the EC2 instances. For example licensing Oracle Enterprise Edition on a single EC2 instance of eight virtual cores would require four processor licenses.

Update: Multicast is not needed for Weblogic clusters starting v10.0. It can clustered over Unicast.