Oracle OpenWorld Sunday: Larry’s Welcome Keynote Announcements

This weekend the yearly Oracle OpenWorld conference took over San Francisco. With about 50.000 attendees, this is one of the biggest – Oracle claims the biggest – technology event in the world. And biggest or not, the event is huge. There are 2,523 sessions planned in 14 venues in downtown SF and 2 big streets are converted to conference locations. This year even Union Square is part of the OpenWorld craziness with music performances throughout the week. Oracle expects the OpenWorld conference will have a $120 million impact to the San Francisco Bay Area. Incredible.

Two Integration & Application Talents colleagues are at OpenWorld 2012: Laurens van der Starre, who also does a presentation about virtualization and Cloud on Tuesday, and me. We will try to post on this blog and we are continuously updating info on Twitter. Be sure to follow us: @Integration & Application TalentsNL, @BigLaurens and @frank_dorst.

Although there are various sessions before, the event traditionally starts with the opening keynote from Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison on Sunday afternoon. I wasn’t impressed by the opening presentation last year but the 10.000 people in the main keynote hall this year saw a driven and funny Larry Ellison. He even used a clicker to switch slides, ending the “next slide please” everybody laughed about.

The big themes for this year are Cloud & Big data, but mostly Cloud. During the keynote presentation Larry made four announcements. I will go into each a bit and we’ll try to follow up with more information when we hear it:

1. Oracle IAAS

Last year Oracle announced the Oracle Public Cloud. The cloud offering would include SAAS (some Oracle Fusion Applications modules) and PAAS (Database and Java as a Cloud). Although the Oracle Public Cloud is still not available, this year an IAAS offering is announced. With IAAS, Oracle will offer Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Storage as a service. This is a bold move, since it opens direct competition to Amazon’s EC2.

2. Oracle Private Cloud

For some customers, mostly non-US, the Oracle Public Cloud is not a viable option because the Exadata / Exalogic machines running the Public Cloud are hosted in the US. European customers may not store privacy sensitive data on servers outside of the US. To tackle this problem, Oracle now introduces the Oracle Private Cloud: on-premise systems and software, managed by Oracle and paid on a monthly basis. This means customers can utilize the Oracle Cloud infrastructure within their own firewall, without the up-front investment. Oracle owns the stack, manages the stack remotely and the customer can scale to its needs and pays what is used for as long as it is used.

3. Oracle Database 12c: multitenancy database

In 2013 (calendar year) the next mayor version of the Oracle database will be released: Oracle 12c (c for cloud). Oracle 12c database is the database for cloud deployments: the first multitenancy database (although there is some discussion about that on Twitter). To architect multitenancy Oracle will introduce the concept of a container database that can hosts many completely separated pluggable databases. Each pluggable database has it’s own everything – i.e. its own security, its own SYS schema, its own PUBLIC SYNONYMS, etc – but you can manage manage them all as one. This increases efficiency, reduces database overhead and simplifies management of large numbers of databases.

4. Oracle Exadata X3: everything in memory and fast, fast, fast…

The final announcement of the welcome keynote was the next generation engineered system, the Exadata X3. The Exadata X3 is the database in-memory machine. With 26TB of internal memory (DRAM and flash ram) in a full rack, it is engineered to have everything in memory. That of course makes Exadata X3 even faster than the X2! The Exadata X3 is priced at the same level as the X2 and there is now an 1/8th rack option available. The 1/8th rack starts at a list price of $200k, but according to Larry Ellison “your local sales rep will do much better than that”.

The welcome keynote sets high hopes for OpenWorld 2012. If you are interested in the whole story, you can watch the recap of Larry Ellison’s Highlights of OpenWorld from the Oracle website for yourself.