Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

Oracle became the latest major IT vendor to tap into the red-hot enterprise cloud computing market today when it unveiled its Exalogic Elastic Cloud today at its annual Oracle Openworld technology confab.

Targeted at large companies who wish to build their own “private clouds“, Exalogic is touted as a “compute cloud-in-a-box” product that includes a combination of servers, storage and networking components melded into a single machine.

“It includes all the hardware you need to run your applications, including 30 servers, infiniband networking that lets servers talk to one another and a high availability storage device,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the show’s opening keynote today. “It also has all the middleware you need to develop and run all your applications.”

Essentially, what Oracle has done is to make it easier for enterprises to set up virtualised data centres where IT resources can be dynamically deployed based on business needs with the help of virtualization technology. Oracle is employing Java VM in Exalogic, where applications can run on Linux or Solaris virtual machines.

The usual cloud computing characteristics apply to Exalogic: dynamic load balancing, failover using Oracle Coherence and the ability to add, remove or migrate virtual machines on the fly.

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