Oracle is launching a worldwide, cloud computing tour. It’s a 50-stop show for developers and system administrators.
But is the tour really about cloud computing? It seems more like virtualization with a touch of focus on how to leverage public cloud environments from providers like Amazon Web Services.
The tour will focus on three topics:
- How IT can become a private cloud service provider for your users.
- How to evolve existing enterprise architectures to a cloud model.
- How to leverage public clouds from providers like Amazon Web Services.
The premise of private cloud computing is to get more out of an enterprise data center. Virtualization technology makes this possible to some extent. But is it really cloud computing? Is private cloud computing just a glorified data center?
The question is the focus of our weekly poll. So far, the question is eliciting responses that question what private computing really means.
Jonathan Lambert has this to say:
“Utility computing is an old model, and on demand resources and APIs are the core of what makes a cloud more than just (usually) virtualization.
The key differentiator here is how organizations approach clouds: how do they do their accounting of resources. If organizations are moving their opex spending to utility resources and on-demand compute resources, that’s a significant move that really indicates a willingness to move to this kind of external resource as they mature.
If they’re simply building programatic extensions of their regular business operations, you’re just looking at another move to gain IT efficiency in the in-house datacenter. The only real difference there is the management approach.”
But this tour may be more about the Sun Microsystems acquisition than anything else. Sun invested heavily in cloud computing. The tour is a chance to talk about Oracle’s new ability to provide infrastructure for companies that seek to build private and public cloud infrastructures.
Perhaps after we will not see the shuttering of the Sun open cloud.
In any case, it’s always fun to write about Oracle. So, why not show our favorite cloud computing video: Larry Ellison doing his most awesome tirade about the folly of cloud computing.
