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Section 02 Middleware

Oracle Middleware
Craig Hampson, Fusion5 Australia General Manager recently attended the APAC Oracle Fusion Middleware Top Partners Club in Shanghai, China on behalf of Fusion5. On his return trip, Craig diarised some of his ndings on the latest announcement from Oracle The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
n a recent long haul ight from Sydney to the Oracle partner middleware event in Shanghai, China, I culled the usual boredom of monotonous travel by trawling through the oers of in ight entertainment. I came across the recent Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man 2 and, after ensuring there was nothing else less mind numbing, took to watching this Marvel Comics based sequel to yes, you have guessed it Iron Man.

One of the objectives of my trip was to better understand Oracles roadmap within the Middleware, Applications, Storage and Hardware landscape. Like (Im sure) many of this magazines readers I was starting to get a little confused as to the strategy and direction vis--vis the Sun Microsystems acquisition and was looking for clarication from the Oracle middleware partners forum in Shanghai. One of the theories behind Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems is to allow Oracle to oer customers a full open standards stack from tin right up to application end user. However, it is important for Oracle to continue to oer open standards based platforms, across the technology stack, in order to protect the myriad of existing customers who have made extensive investments in mixed technology stack solutions. So how does Oracle demonstrate and convince us that a one-stack platform branded Oracle represents the best value to the customer? The one throat to choke mantra is a valid sell, but it only goes so far. The real value proposition comes from marrying software and hardware in one complete solution that oers measurable cost value benets there you go, in one sentence, I have managed to capture Oracles newest tag line Software Hardware Complete. It should therefore come as no surprise why Larry Ellison, Oracles co-founder and CEO, looked for product placement advertising investment in Iron Man 2. In fact in the rst ten minutes of the lm I noted two blatant mentions of Oracle and indeed a cameo appearance of Ellison himself. Anyhow I digress. Following on from the basic premise of the original lm, Iron Man 2 continues the story of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) a billionaire inventor and part time armoured super hero who struggles with the challenge of successfully marrying himself (the software) with his exoskeleton iron clad super suit (the hardware). As should be with any good advertising investment, the lm is predictable in its outcome; by using innovative design and research as well as acquisition of new technology, Stark, aka Iron Man, is able to conquer good over evil and triumph in the end. Similarly, Oracle would have us believe that it is their innovative combination of hardware in the form of Sun Microsystems, and its own incumbent software solutions that appears to have triumphed.

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However this is not to be a movie review so lets try to get to the point of this article. On my way back from China, as I gathered my thoughts following the Shanghai middleware forum, I took the opportunity to take in some of Chinas amazing historical sights such as The Forbidden City in Beijing and walked about 610 meters of the 6100 km Great Wall. I Facebooked my status from the Wall (and before I get a ood of doubting emails, the Chinese government has indeed banned access to certain web sites such as Facebook, but have forgotten about the iPhone app!) saying I had been spiritually enlightened. To many of my Facebook friends this would have been interpreted as too many gins, however what I may have been referring to was the enlightenment I had just gleaned from the forum on Oracles forward thinking strategy to add customer value in the form of the mantra Software Hardware Complete As I write this ying overhead Dubbo on approach into Sydney and just ahead of my editors submission deadline, the penny has dropped. Cleverly, Oracle has realised that when it comes to superior performance from your multi vendor infrastructure platform - i.e. your software and hardware solutions platform, you can only go so far by throwing money (more hardware, more tuning, more software) at the performance and scalability issue. This reminds me somewhat of my own performance issues wait for it - in my golf game. I soon realised that in order to really achieve a golf stroke a fair way down the fairway, my golf club and I had to become one it was not going to help by throwing good money after bad buying up the latest and greatest in golf club technology without me rst truly becoming one with the club.

Many of you may have heard of Oracle Exadata Database Machine the combination of Oracle database and Sun hardware technologies in one system to provide high performance enterprise storage solutions. But what really starts to get the adrenaline owing is the appliance-based nature of Oracles recent announcement last month of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. What a load of nonsense I hear the reader proclaim. However pause for a moment whist we consider further. What Oracle has announced here is nothing short of genius. By engineering a hardware platform intimately embedded but importantly - still open with the Java WebLogic application server, they have managed to achieve performance and value benchmark gures far beyond any single or indeed combination of competitors similar oerings. Oracle summarise that most enterprise IT organisations have inherited years of innovation, expansion and acquisition that have resulted in sprawling infrastructure stretching the limits of manageability. While the individual IT systems and applications in service are often well considered and expertly implemented, the sheer scale of the ongoing IT investment itself has emerged as the dominant concern. Even when best-of-breed technologies, open standards and modern architectural practices such as SOA have been employed pervasively, most small to medium and large enterprises now nd themselves with too many platforms, too many technologies, too many domains of expertise, and too many vendors to coordinate and manage. This is no dierent from the organisations of many readers of this publication. In order to combat the above, many organisations have adopted techniques ranging from virtualisation and centralised storage to enterprise-wide standardisation of software and hardware. Recently, however, the discussion of specic cost containment techniques has given way to a larger discussion of the transformation of IT from cost centre to prot centre. This transformation typically involves adoption of a more centralised, automated, and elastic infrastructure and regime today commonly referred to as private cloud. Oracle believe real-world approaches that truly deliver on the promise of private cloud will involve systems engineered together for maximum performance while balancing openness, reliability, cost, exibility, and resource eciency. Perhaps most importantly,

these engineered systems must not be monolithic; it must be possible for organisations to implement them over time, at a pace determined by their business needs and investment constraints. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is touted as the worlds rst engineered system specically designed to provide organisations with a foundation for secure, mission-critical private clouds capable of virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and management simplicity. Oracle is pushing Exalogic as the ideal platform for applications of all types, from small-scale departmental applications to the largest and most demanding ERP and transaction intensive applications. While Exalogic is factory optimised for enterprise Java, Oracle Fusion Middleware

The real value proposition comes from marrying software and hardware in one complete solution that oers measurable cost value benets.
and the future Oracle Fusion Applications it is also an open standards based environment for the thousands of third-party and custom Linux and Solaris applications widely deployed today. Oracle Exalogic benchmarks indicate performance metrics ten times better than standard application server conguration which will result in huge cost savings in the datacentre with reduced overheads on maintenance and manageability not to mention space! Existing applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne will run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud transparently, without needing any modication. Larry Ellison sums it up with the following quote: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a complete system of servers, network, storage, VM, operating system and middleware, all engineered to work together. This delivers stunning results, including the fastest Java performance, elastic capacity on demand and a fully fault tolerant system. I for one will be looking to real life use cases to include in the next few issues, and will endeavour to report back as the uptake of Exalogic becomes a reality.

Confucius says Man who do not understand Oracles complete hardware-software strategy cannot extract value from it
So with the above analogies of Larry Ellisons Iron Man 2 and this writers poor golf game in mind, lets look at how they relate to Oracles latest foray into the complete hardware and software solution there go those strap line words again!