Oracle & Virtual Iron – The Monolith Grows Again
Friday, May 15, 200909:42 am EDT
Hot on the heels of Oracle swallowing up Sun we see more of the puzzle coming together with this week’s Virtual Iron acquisition. It seems pretty clear that Oracle has set its sights on becoming the next IBM, with a complete end-to-end portfolio of software, hardware, storage, and services.
Virtual Iron is a necessary buy for Oracle because its own Oracle VM (ovm) solution is pretty basic. In a previous post I noted that Oracle has open hostility toward VMware, going so far at one time to say that the Oracle database would not be supported on ESX. Since Oracle will presumably soon have hardware and another OS to add to its database and application fiefdom, the need to bulk up on virtualization management is a must if the company is to take on both IBM and Microsoft.
With Sun’s xVM, Oracle’s ovm, and now Virtual Iron, Oracle will need to focus on delivering a coherent virtualization platform, and data center class management capabilities will be the key. While Oracle beefs up its offerings to take on hypervisor competitors (VMware, Citrix, Microsoft),none of these companies have figured out how to go beyond live migration to allow zero downtime maintenance for the application or database running on the VM. Live migration has become one of the litmus tests for how enterprise-ready a virtualization solution is – and it is important for enabling maintenance on a host server, but it is still lacking.
Virtualization delivers all kinds of benefits for IT shops, but do end users (i.e. the ones paying for all these services) really care? If maintenance windows like those I get every few weeks from salesforce.com remain the defining user experience, then a lot more progress needs to be made. Customers want to be able to promote, migrate, patch, and upgrade without interrupting services – xkoto’s GRIDSCALE delivers this capability – TODAY—for the database.
But back to the Oracle acquisition spree – since they want to be the monolithic IT provider of this century - my unsolicited prediction is that they will set their sights on better volume management and anti-virus security at some point (since they have almost everything else now) – Symantec anyone?
