Oracle Announces Enterprise "Cloud in a Box"

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I try to keep this blog focused on HPC, but sometimes the I can’t resist the siren song of the PR HooptyCloud.

It seems like just yesterday that Intel showed us their Cloud on Chip, a curious metaphorical description of a tangible object.  Not to be outdone, yesterday Larry Ellison devolved this concept to the rack level with his announcement of the Exalogic Cloud in a Box.

Lofty speeches aside, the interesting part of this Exalogic is what Larry claims it can do. By integrating their Exadata hardware, IB networking, storage, and Fusion middleware, this one device can “handle all of Facebook’s world html traffic.” That’s pretty impressive considering that Facebook has more than 375 million users, and by some estimates, accounts for over 20 percent of Internet activity in America alone.

Good keynotes are more about emotion than technology. Will this Cloud in a Box replace entire datacenters someday? Oracle shareholders hope so. In the meantime, logic dictates caution, Captain.