Another take on Oracle’s #Exalogic
Some of the more “established” players in the cloud marketspace take a potshot at Oracle’s Exalogic over on ReadWriteWeb today (I say “established,” because the market is far too young to have any truly established players as of yet). Essentially, their gripe is the “cloud in a box” marketing metaphor Oracle is using to push the hardware. Specifically, John Considine says
The Exalogic server is a contained set of resources that is purchased, operated, and maintained as part of the enterprise infrastructure. You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased. While you can add more racks to the solution, you are stuck paying for the whole thing independent from what you really use – not exactly elastic or pay for only what you use.
To which I say, “Um, yes. And?” Oracle isn’t marketing Exalogic to startups who want to host their environment on the cloud; Oracle seems to be marketing Exalogic to large companies who want to provide their own internal cloud to host their own applications. Once you look at Exalogic from that perspective, then the criticism stops being very persuasive. Any cloud platform is going to be limited to the numbers of cores/RAM/storage available; within any cloud platform, you can scale up and down only within your available resources; if you need to add more capacity, you have to pay for the entire gamut of capacity you want to add, not what you actually use. This becomes a somewhat standard capacity provisioning problem at this point, one of which can be simplified by the unified forklift install of Exalogic.
Don’t get me wrong; I see lots of things wrong with Exalogic. Not the least of which is my view that Oracle is fighting off the coming disruption (of an inventor’s dilemma type) of a commodity everything cloud (hardware/software/infrastructure/VMs/etc where “good enough” gets by cheaper) by trying to sell the performance side of their engineering genius. But John’s comment isn’t one of them.
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