News

Oracle Tackles AWS with New Cloud Offerings

• By David Ramel
• 11/02/2015

The industry is buzzing about Oracle Corp.'s multi-pronged assault on Amazon Web Services Inc.'s (AWS) position as the clear-cut cloud computing leader.

Just after another AWS rival, HP, gave up the cloud fight, Oracle emerged with its own Elastic Compute Cloud and many other products and services that industry observers saw as a direct challenge to AWS. Along with the new services, chairman Larry Ellison made no mistake about who the company was targeting in his keynote remarks.

"In this new world of cloud computing, everything has changed, and almost all of our competitors are new," Ellison reportedly said. "We compete with Amazon in cloud infrastructure and never, ever see IBM -- this is how much our world has changed."

The new Oracle Elastic Compute Cloud exemplifies the challenge toward AWS, being tilted directly against the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It comes with two offerings called Elastic Compute and Dedicated Compute. "Elastic Compute enables customers to leverage elastic compute capabilities to run any workload in the cloud in a shared compute zone," Oracle said last week. "The Dedicated Compute offering also offers customers elasticity but with added capability such CPU pinning and complete network isolation provides predictable, consistent performance with no noisy neighbors. The Compute Cloud is secure, enterprise-grade, fully configurable and provides robust monitoring capabilities. It supports a variety of different operating systems including Linux and Windows."

Other new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offerings introduced by Oracle president Thomas Kurian during his keynote include Oracle Storage Cloud Service – Archive Storage, Oracle Storage Cloud Service – File Storage, Oracle Network Cloud, and Oracle Container Cloud Pre-Certified Technology and Applications Stacks.

The company also announced new Big Data offerings and new polyglot development capability via the addition of JavaScript to its dev tooling.

"Organizations want flexible, proven and secure infrastructure to run their enterprise workloads in the cloud," Kurian said. "Oracle's infrastructure services already power the Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle SaaS businesses and some of the world's most recognizable organizations. 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."