Oracle brings its database, apps and systems into the OpenStack fold

The OpenStack Foundation got a major boost just before Christmas with the news that Oracle has joined the organisation.

This is a significant move for both parties, for till now OpenStack has largely been a focus for systems and service provider companies, such as Rackspace, IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Huawei, VMware and Parallels amongst many others. The addition of Oracle brings the first major applications vendor business into the fold, a move which will significantly expand its potential to end users.

It will also expand the market potential for Oracle itself, which has for some time largely slipped into the role of being a maintenance company, earning revenue from maintaining its extensive installed base of applications and database systems. Joining OpenStack, when coupled with its recently announced move into the provision of `omni-cloud’ capabilities – an as-you-like-it range of cloud options covering IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private, public and hybrid clouds, without or without hosting -  should present huge potential opportunities for the company to open up entirely new markets for its products.

The move has sprung off the back of its introduction of a new roadmap for Nimbula Director at OracleWorld last September that included the integration of OpenStack APIs into Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. This is Oracle’s recently acquired software that gave it the ability to deliver IaaS.

It has now unveiled plans to deliver OpenStack capabilities in a wide range of Oracle products, including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle ZS3 Series and Pillar Axiom storage systems, and StorageTek tape systems. It also intends to achieve OpenStack compatibility in Oracle Compute Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud.

The integration of Oracle Solaris with OpenStack means customers can mix and match Solaris and other OpenStack-compatible clouds, giving them much greater flexibility in architecting and orchestrating their operational environments.

Compatibility between the Oracle’s new Cloud Compute, which lets users launch user-configurable VM instances on demand, and OpenStack Nova should enable easier management of virtualised compute services across clouds.

The company also plans to establish compatibility between its own Storage Cloud and OpenStack’s Swift for object storage services in the cloud. It will also integrate OpenStack into its established storage product offerings, such as Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, Pillar Axiom systems, and StorageTek tape solutions, using OpenStack APIs.

By joining OpenStack, Oracle is creating some interesting possibilities for both its channel partners and user businesses, particularly amongst the SMB community. Its database and applications products have an enviable track record, but for most of those companies an unreachable price point. That could, indeed should, now change significantly. It will give channel partners the opportunity to mix applications and tools from other vendors with Oracle, and resource it from a wide range of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

To this end, the recent addition to the OpenStack fold of Parallels could advance this even more. That company’s specialisation in providing a cloud service management environment for smaller CSPs looking to service the SMB sector could be a very helpful platform for those channel partners to adopt.

There would also be considerable synergy between the applications those partners create using Oracle’s apps and the Applications Packaging Standard (APS) developed and promoted by Parallels. This provides a toolset that can then deliver an application, complete with all relevant tools, configuration and optimisation data needed to automatically install it on any existing CSP running the Parallels management system.

As an aside, this could overcome the potential that Oracle moving in on cloud service provision might put added pressure on securityissues. This especially the case when it comes to where business data is stored and the impact of such important factors as the US Patriot Act and the fallout from the NSA/PRISM scandal in the USA. Oracle is a major US corporation, so the inevitable threat is that non-US businesses signing up for services hosted by the company must consider the possibility of their data being held on US-located systems – with all the security and access implications that entails.

Oracle’s adoption of OpenStack, however, could be a good counter to that possibility, in that it would allow Oracle applications and database tools to run on a growing range third party services located around the world. For example, Chinese telecoms services vendor, China Unicom, has recently jumped into the cloud marketplace with a service called Wo-Cloud. This is based on OpenStack and therefore opens up many new opportunities for both Oracle itself and its channel partners.