Oracle is hoping to take cloud computing to, let’s say, new heights. On Sunday at its OpenWorld 2010 conference in San Francisco, Calif., the rapidly expanding company announced its new Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which it described as a “Java consolidation platform” that can handle enterprise workloads ranging from applications for a small department to mainframe apps. At the same time, Oracle announced a new generation of business apps called Fusion Applications.
Oracle called the Exalogic “the world’s first integrated middleware machine,” designed to provide a “complete cloud application infrastructure.” The product runs on 64-bit x86 processors, combining 30 servers, each with two processors, and with each socket having six cores, for 360 cores in a single box. It’s all connected by InfiniBand-based I/O networking and includes the Oracle WebLogic Server and Exalogic software.
The system is so powerful, CEO Larry Ellison said, that Facebook would only need two of them to run its entire service for its half-billion users.
One Million HTTP Requests Per Second
The company said the I/O fabric helps the machine deliver performance 10 times better than a standard application server configuration. Oracle reported the product has demonstrated, in internal testing, the ability to handle more than a million HTTP requests per second.
Intended for large-scale deployments, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud can support thousands of apps, each with differing requirements for performance, security or reliability. The Exalogic is optimized to accelerate performance from other Oracle products, including the Fusion product portfolio and Oracle Database 11g. The company’s E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprises, JD Edwards, and industry-specific apps can run on the Exalogic without modifications.
The new Fusion Applications are delivered as a suite of modular apps that can enhance current applications, with which they run side by side. Fusion, which the company said is 100 percent open-standards-based, has more than 100 modules…