Oracle and Intel on Tuesday announced a joint effort to accelerate enterprise readiness for cloud computing and make it more efficient and secure. The companies also plan to identify and drive standards to breed flexible deployment across private and public clouds.
Cloud computing is an efficient way to run programs and store data that a large number of users can access through Internet technologies. Oracle and Intel already have common ground in the enterprise, where customers are running applications on shared infrastructure within their firewalls using Intel Virtualization Technology and Oracle Grid Computing technologies. This foundation sets the stage for private clouds of internal applications, as well as the ability to extend them to public, multi-tenant clouds, according to the companies.
"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards-based," said Robert Shimp, group vice president of the Oracle Global Technology Business Unit. "Intel and Oracle are collaborating to make this happen."
Efficiency, Security and Standards
Oracle and Intel will cooperate in three broad areas: efficiency, security and standards.
The companies point to a 17 percent performance increase for Oracle databases running virtualized on Intel Xeon processors. Oracle and Intel will continue working together to drive additional performance and power-efficiency gains.
Security is also a hot-button issue for enterprises running software in public clouds. Companies want assurances that the environment is secure and private data is only accessible by authorized users, Oracle and Intel said. Activities also need to be tracked for auditing and compliance reporting. Oracle and Intel have pledged to work together to strengthen virtual-machine security in shared cloud environments.
Finally, Intel and Oracle will join with other industry leaders to extend standards that enable portability of virtual-machine images, such as the Open Virtual Format, and to create standards for cloud-based services.
"Intel and Oracle are taking a leadership role to expand the reach of enterprise-ready cloud computing," said Doug Fisher, vice president of Intel's software and solutions group. "By collaborating to improve efficiency, extend standards, and enhance security, we're making cloud computing more of an option for enterprise deployments."
Challenging the Status Quo
Oracle, Intel and many others are tapping into the promise of cloud computing. Merrill Lynch predicts cloud computing will be a $160 billion market by 2011, including $95 billion in business and productivity apps and $65 billion in online advertising.
As Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala sees it, cloud computing is the way of the future. The ability to move all non-strategic assets into the cloud saves enterprises significant dollars, offers better utilization, and cuts future deployment costs, he said. But there are challenges before cloud computing hits the mainstream.
"There's already a large amount of technology deployed on premise, and it's going to take years to migrate that onto the cloud. Also, pricing strategies are still unclear and who will be the future cloud providers is not yet certain," Kerravala said.
"Anybody can put up cloud infrastructures, but convincing application developers to write applications differently and convincing companies to move things they've done historically in-house out onto the cloud is another matter," he said. "Any time you change the way computing is done, it takes a while for that to happen."
