Like other people, I’ve been wondering how Oracle has integrated many of Sun’s technologies and hardware after buying that company. Oracle has just started a nationwide tour to inform us of just that. The first stop was in their neck of the woods, Palo Alto, California. The free seminar information, titled "Share the Vision: Build aMore Efficient and Powerful Datacenter with Oracle,” is found here, along with the agenda and locations.

Now that Oracle has Sun’s hardware, Solaris operating system, virtualization engine, and other components, they can provide well-integrated solutions for data centers, as this slide shows:

The plan is to increase server and storage performance by several times and even tens of times more in a few years.

 Server Performance Increase

 Storage Performance Increase

 In addition to Solaris, they have Red Hat–compatible Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) and support. Their virtualization is implemented through Oracle’s version of Xen software, Oracle VM. On top of Xen, Oracle added management and other software to make it a comprehensive offering for virtualization. The features of Virtual Iron, which Oracle acquired some time ago, are being integrated into Oracle VM. Both Oracle VM and Virtual Iron are based on Xen, so the integration should not be too hard.

 A presentation on cloud computing was a good tutorial. Many of Oracle’s customers are enterprises, which tend to use VMware’s virtualization solution. Oracle provides a feature to translate VMware VM file formats to theirs. Currently, private or on-premise clouds are implemented mostly with VMware, and public clouds (AWS and Rackspace) are implemented with Xen. Eucalyptus’s enterprise version has a feature that is the reverse of what Oracle VM does. It can translate VMs by VMware on-premise to AWS file formats to allow them to be transported to AWS public cloud (known as CloudBurst).

 Oracle view on Enterprise Evolution to Cloud

 Since Oracle now owns microprocessors, server and storage hardware, operating systems, virtualization engines, databases, and applications, they can fine-tune the entire system to make it very efficient and execute very fast. Although Oracle is still small compared with IBM in terms of revenue (Oracle $27B vs. IBM $96B), Oracle is now in a position to compete with IBM.

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		Energy Efficient Cooling for Data Centers: A Close-Coupled Row Solution
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 The seminar was well run and presented very useful information. If there was one thing I did not like about it, it was the lack of discussion of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency and green IT initiatives were mentioned several times during the day, but they were not discussed in detail. I asked one of the speakers to share some energy efficiency data with me. If and when I get it, I will publish it here.

I have not touched upon cloud computing for some time. I just came across a very interesting company in this space. Its name is ServiceMesh.

Mark Thiele, an expert in data center/cloud computing, mentioned this company. He was nice enough to introduce me to Dave Roberts, VP of marketing at ServiceMesh. Incidentally, I knew Dave a little bit when he was at a networking company in Silicon Valley. He moved from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, where most of ServiceMesh’s development team members reside. The meeting was conducted using a Web meeting service.

Dave Roberts

It took me a while before I could understand ServiceMesh’s business. They are a software company and provide professional services as well. In short, ServiceMesh helps large enterprise customers transition to an on-demand, everything as a service IT operating model. Their software product, Agility Platform, provides an end-to-end governance, workflow, policy management, and automation system for deploying applications in clouds. Their software reads in all the application information with their IT equipment information (CMDB if available), SLA, and security requirements, and spits out a report. The report contains feasibility information as to whether each application should be run in a cloud. If particular software requires very stringent response time, for example, it may not be suitable in a cloud environment. As shown in the following figure, ServiceMesh’s software can interface with a variety of different cloud service providers, including internal service providers building private clouds. ServiceMesh makes it easy for enterprises to use the right service provider for each application, subject to the specific SLA, security, and accountability requirements. Once the correct application stacks have been identified and built, ServiceMesh automates the deployment process, using cloud-provider APIs to start, stop, and manage application virtual machines in the target cloud.

The name of the software product is Agility Platform, and it consists of four major components:

• Agility Planner generates a report as to which applications are suitable for cloud computing and provides the basic configuration information to Factory.
• Agility Factory takes what was produced by Planner and allows a user to create a set of stacks suitable for each enterprise application. New stacks can be created from existing stacks already stored in CenterPoint.
• Agility CenterPoint stores stacks that have been verified and used before in that enterprise. It serves as a repository and collaboration point for stacks.
• Agility Manager deploys stacks into one or more cloud providers (including private clouds) and monitors them over time.

This is shown in the next picture.

In addition, ServiceMesh provides identity management, security by VPN, firewall, host intrusion detection, and antivirus.

Even though cloud computing is maturing, enterprises are still slow to adopt it. Major reasons given for that are the lack of security and SLA, vendor lock-in, and so on. I think ServiceMesh’s offerings are unique and interesting for a few reasons.

1. They work with leading cloud computing providers to improve their services to suit an enterprise’s stringent requirements. This alone could be a major contribution.
2. Cloud computing is totally new to most enterprises, and they do not know how to start with it. ServiceMesh provides them strategic advice on how to use it. The first thing to do is to inventory IT equipment and applications. Not all applications are suitable for a cloud environment, and this information alone is very useful to know.
3. The Agility tool suite provides end-to-end governance and policy controls around the deployment of applications into the cloud. This helps IT keep control of key application and data assets and ensure that they comply with all legal, regulatory, and business rules while still accessing the benefits available with cloud computing.

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		Preventing Data Corruption in the Event of an Extended Power Outage
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To target enterprises that are new to cloud computing, it is necessary to satisfy their needs and provide automation for ease of conversion. For the first point, ServiceMesh teams up with leading cloud providers to solve those concerns. For the second point, ServiceMesh’s automated tools help and accelerate the adoption. They seem to be signing up large enterprise customers rapidly. Of course, only time will tell how their business models work out.