Oracle's decision to enable customers to license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware to run in Amazon's EC2 environment is a good move for both companies. Oracle also announces the creation of a cloud-based backup solution.Oracle is embracing cloud computing with its support for Amazon Web
Services' Elastic
Compute Cloud environment.
The move, announced Sept. 22 at Oracle OpenWorld in San
Francisco, will benefit both companies as enterprises
look to the cloud for more services.
Right now, Oracle plans to allow customers to license Oracle Database 11g,
Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware to run on EC2. To help
enterprises deploy its products on EC2 quickly, Oracle is delivering a set of
free AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) with which virtual machines can be provisioned
with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
The software vendor is also delivering a cloud-based backup solution called
Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module. The backup offering allows customers to use
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as a database backup destination. In
addition, the Oracle and Amazon.com are working on solutions that will enable
cost-effective, high-volume backups and restorations in environments with
limited network-bandwidth by means of physical import and export, according to
Oracle.
Taking all these things in combination, Oracle is going full steam ahead
with cloud computing at a time when database
rival Microsoft is pursuing a cloud strategy of its own.
"Oracle has allowed customers to access applications that Oracle hosts
for some time, such as Siebel and PeopleSoft," said Rebecca Wettemann,
vice president of research at Nucleus Research. "What we've found is that
this allows customers to take advantage of Oracle technology and expertise and
have a less disruptive upgrade cycle. It makes sense to extend that to the
middleware layer, given Oracle's strategy to integrate business processes and
applications through the middleware layer."
For Amazon.com, Oracle's move gives AWS customers the ability
to leverage a well-known database. AWS customers also get
access to a number of tools to help them build enterprise applications to
run in the cloud. In addition, Oracle Unbreakable Linux support and Amazon
Premium support are available for Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2.
"For the first time, customers who want to run
Oracle's industry-leading software to develop and deploy new, innovative applications
in the cloud can do so with Oracle running on AWS (Amazon Web Services),"
Adam Selipsky, AWS vice president of product management and developer
relations, said in a statement.
Cloud Computing 
