Exciting Year Ahead for Cloud Application Foundation, Exalogic and Java in the Cloud

During the Christmas Holidays, I spent some time thinking through some work priorities for 2015. The team is delivering a host of new product releases. These are the fruits of multiple years of fundamental innovations and collaboration by multiple teams that I have the opportunity to manage and work with. 

Some great innovations we have planned include: 

Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2 - marking the next generation of Oracle Engineered System for running Java, Oracle Middleware and Oracle Applications with breakthrough performance and scalability and integrated app to disk manageability. For more see this post.

Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 12c - this long awaited release of the next generation of Exalogic Software features the same technology stack as Oracle Cloud - specifically the Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service implementation provided on the public cloud. This innovation offers customers the opportunity to realize hybrid cloud, today. As part of our next release, customers will get access to the Java Cloud Service, on premise with Exalogic. Other PaaS services from Oracle Cloud will follow. Intrigued? See this video.

Weblogic Server Multi-tenant - tired of virtual machine hangover? 1000s of virtual machines to manage? Weblogic's next innovation is multi-tenancy built directly into the Java EE runtime. What this means is faster startup times, more efficient memory utilization resulting in smaller server footprints, and a significant reduction in the number of Weblogic domains to manage. 

Java Cloud Service - in addition to the Java Cloud Service currently available, new capabilities to be introduced include Java Virtual Machine as a service which will give the ability to run any framework on top of standard JVM. This capability will give customers the ability to bring any server-side Java application to Oracle Cloud and benefit from the built-in deployment and manageability enhancements. 

2015 indeed marks an exciting time for the team! 

p.s. Usual caveats apply regarding dates for shipping software. Please see Oracle's revenue recognition policy below.
The preceding was intended to outline our general product direction. It was intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Exalogic Elastic Cloud 12c Software and Exalogic X5-2 Hardware Launch

We're excited to announce the release of the first of two fundamental innovations in Oracle Exalogic - our planned 12c Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software and our new X5-2 hardware, the latter of which is available immediately.

Beginning with software, we're seeing a massive shift from traditional pure virtualization to cloud. In our 12c release, Exalogic is aligning with Oracle's public cloud to offer the same IaaS and PaaS layers, with Java Cloud Service being offered as our first PaaS solution. By adopting the same IaaS and PaaS layers, we're able to offer our customers the exact same experience whether on or off premise. Performance continues to be a defining characteristic of Oracle Exalogic, with workloads having 5-10x greater performance and throughput compared to traditional systems. 

To see how we got to this point, let's look back at the 1990s.That era was characterized by big monolithic apps running on large, non-virtualized servers. This is known as "Generation 0." In the 2000s, many workloads were virtualized. This is known as "Generation 1." While an enormous evolution over physical, virtualization didn't change the equation all that much - in fact it made it worse. Rather than having one large server, there are many smaller virtual machines. The maintenance problems only multiplied as it became easier to provision virtual machines.

In today's world, cloud is beginning to take over and Oracle is the leading vendor in the transition to cloud. Cloud is known as "Generation 2." Cloud offers virtualization as well but it offers a number of new features that make it distinct from Generation 1. Cloud offers simple provisioning, elasticity to support ever-changing workloads, automated backup/recovery/patching and more. Resources - from compute to network to storage to Java - are offered up as services, with the consumer of the services detached from the back-end work required to offer and maintain the services. As much as possible, end-consumers provision some software, with the hardware behind the software being provided, configured, updated, backed-up seamlessly. Cloud is often consumed off premise, but with the introduction of Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 12c, customers will be able to consume the same IaaS and PaaS services in Oracle's public cloud, or on premise on Oracle Exalogic hardware.

Exalogic X5-2 is the next Generation of our hardware platform, built to support Generation 2 (although the 12c software will support existing hardware platforms). Ahead of defining specifications for the platform, we performed extensive research to look at how we can continue to have a balanced architecture to support the workloads our customers have. Thinking of Exalogic X5-2 in the context of a Generation 2 cloud model, high density of virtual machines on each individual server is a prerequisite, in addition to a shared network, storage system and most important, high I/O throughput (which is achieved through Exabus on Exalogic). In order to deliver on a balanced architecture, we've increased the density of cores per compute node up to 36, meaning customers can have up to 1,080 physical cores in a single rack of Oracle Exalogic X5-2. There are a number of other enhancements including a move to DDR4 to provide faster memory, an increase in SSD per compute node to 800 GB, and an 800 GB write cache in our storage appliance. Collectively, these changes make Exalogic X5-2 the best available hardware platform for Generation 2 computing. 

Want to know more about what customers are doing with Exalogic? Listen to these two customers speak about their use of Exalogic a the X5 launch. Aaron de Los Reyes speaks about 9x reduction in hardware footprint and 50% operational cost savings.  Did you know that Exalogic also powers the heart of Silicon Valley? City of San Francisco's Dennis McCormick speaks about their use of Exalogic and Exadata.

To learn more, have a look at the Elastic Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2 launch video.