Exalogic Larry Ellison continued his key note from Sunday by reintroducing Exalogic a “high performance server with hardware and middleware specifically designed for running public or private cloud systems. “ We spent a lot of time optimizing Oracle software to run on the Exalogic box,” Larry said. He referred to Exalogic as “one big honkin’ cloud,” and called the system “the fastest computer for running Java applications software” and said “it could be used for application consolidation or for running both public and private cloud systems.” The internal components of the system include: The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server combines 64-bit x86 hardware, a total of 30 compute servers with 360 cores, with Oracle middleware such as the Weblogic server, Oracle Coherence data grid software, JRockit Java runtime software and Oracle VM virtualization software. The system uses infiniBand technology (capable of handling 40 gigabits per second) to link its internal components, has 2.8 TB of DRAM, 4TB of read cache and 960 GB of solid-state disk storage. Oracle will offer Linux and the Solaris operating systems with Exalogic.

I’ve received several questions about ISO 19770, the international standard for Software Asset Management, over the past couple of months. Let’s review the landscape… First of all, ISO is an acronym for the International Organization for Standards (ISO) based in Geneva, Switzerland. It is a network of the national standards institutes of over 163 countries that, through many specialized committees, works to develop a consensus among member nations on standards that will be accepted by all countries. You have very likely heard or seen advertisements for companies that included a reference to their ISO 9000 certification, which is becoming a worldwide quality management requirement for companies that wish to become part of a supply chain for major global manufacturers or distributors.

After more than five years in development Larry Ellison formally announced the release of Oracle’s Fusion Applications suite of products. The development of Fusion Applications started in 2004 and it is the largest engineering feat in the history of Oracle. “Oracle has taken the [best] functionality from its own eBusiness Suite applications, as well as its acquired PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel products, and rebuilt them to run on the company’s Fusion middleware,“ to form the next generation of enterprise application technology. By insisting on merging the best features from Oracle’s ERP, CRM, and HRMS products, Oracle created a Fusion applications design team using experienced engineers from eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE, and consolidated their design work on a single unified platform. Fusion Applications are the first enterprise applications to be written 100% on Standard Fusion Middleware. In previous releases of Oracle’s family of applications (eBS, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Siebel) the applications middleware was different from Oracle’s standard Fusion Middleware platform. Oracle in essence had two middleware development teams working separately on two types of middleware. The goal behind Fusion Applications was to combine the applications middleware team with the Fusion middleware team and extend Fusion Middleware to support Fusion Applications.

This is part three in a four part blog series Oracle Open World (OOW) Recap. To view part two, visit Oracle Open World Recap – Part II Similar to the Keynote on Sunday, Larry entered the stage and began his presentation to highlights of his America’s Cup victory. Still beaming over the victory, Larry graciously introduced members of the America’s Cup team that were in attendance and asked that they stand, as they stood and took a bow they received a much deserved round of applause and cheers. The stage was designed in the traditional Oracle two screen set -up and bathed Larry in a warm reddish hue. Larry wore his trademark dark suit and turtleneck and limited his bombastic and condescending comments to Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. Surprisingly, he only made one self-effacing or arrogant comment, depending on your perspective, when he called Bugatti his favorite commuter car. Not sure how many of us commute to work in a Bugatti so I don’t know how to interpret that comment so I will leave the interpretation up to the readers so that they can draw their own conclusion.

For Public Sector (“PS”) customers, the networking continued on Monday night at the only purely PS focused event at Open World, the annual Oracle Public Sector Reception at Jillian’s. This Industry event is where PS customers could meet with Oracle PS experts for a night of food, drink, and sports, in a casual environment while watching Monday Night Football on several big screen TV’s in a fun sports atmosphere. This year’s event was heavily attended relative to past years; I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout.. The pool tables were packed with lines 2-3 people deep at each table so some additional games would have helped alleviate the overflow on the pool tables. This was a good problem to have considering that the majority of attendees were customers and not Oracle employees. I would suggest to Jillian’s that they add foosball and air hockey to their inventory of games next year to help alleviate the wait for a pool table. I would specifically suggest these two games based on their popularity at the “Game Zone” lounge in the Exhibit Hall. Both of these games were extremely popular and were only preceded in popularity by “Dance Dance Revolution” and the ever popular “Pop a Shot!” The only thing not included in the carnival atmosphere of the Exhibit halls and game lounge was a carnival barker, a palm reader, candied applies, and stuffed animals. I left having won 3 out of 5 air hockey games but without any prizes or cotton candy for my efforts. I did, however, have a wonderful time and I encourage Oracle to keep up that tradition at future Open Worlds especially for those attendees that bring children.

I just returned from Oracle Open World (“OOW”) 2010 and it was a tremendous show. In fact, it was so outstanding that I had to break my analysis into four parts: my two part general overview of the conference, a preview of Oracle’s most recent product announcements, and a preview of Oracle’s latest addition to the Exadata product line. This year’s version of Open World was extremely well organized and attended. The events are always top notch and they do a very nice job with logistics moving people around the city and in/out of the Moscone Center (which is one of the better convention centers I’ve attended.). The weather was very accommodating (mid 70’s light breeze) with no rain. The planning committee should take this into consideration given that last year’s convention in October experienced tumultuous rain storms and impaired an otherwise great convention. The weather in September has been consistently better over the years than in October and hopefully OOW will be solidly entrenched in September going forward.

DLT has recognized this trend and the growing demand for these types of services in our earlier report on Top Trends in ERP for 2010. In that report we suggested that new license growth would slow in 2010 to single digits and that IT Services would outpace new ERP Sales by almost 50% and register double digit growth in 2010 and beyond. To take advantage of this trend, and to better meet the needs of our customers, DLT has evolved beyond the traditional VAR model to provide our customers with the necessary services to meet this growing market. This is a business model which we feel will shortly begin to replace the traditional VAD and VAR models as license and service businesses begin to merge in order to replace the decrease in new license growth and the subsequent drop in revenue. To stay ahead of this trend DLT has partnered with SmartDog Services to deliver complementary services, fixed-priced limited engagements, and enhanced software support, to all of our existing and new customers who choose to take advantage of these services. This isn’t unprecedented and we believe that it will become more pronounced and commonplace in 2011.

I have been working with clusters since the mid-90’s. Back then, for Oracle on Solaris, it was required to use Sun Cluster 2.0 for Oracle Parallel Server (OPS). I was not a fan of Sun Cluster 2.x, it had many issues, and I was hesitant when I was introduced to Symantec VCS. After working with VCS I started to see its simplicity and its benefits. I loved how easy it was to install, setup and manage. I became very familiar with it in a Sun Solaris environment.

Oracle Clusterware 10g will always handle node fencing (aka eviction) by rebooting one or more nodes. Oracle didn’t have its own cluster manager software for most platforms on 9i. So, if your customer was on a platform where Oracle didn’t have a cluster manager of its own (it only had a Linux and Windows), then building the RAC cluster would have required some 3rd party software. Some of the 3rd party cluster managers used different schemes to fence nodes from the cluster. Many of them used I/O fencing which is less disruptive in that it didn’t require a node reboot, but required more proprietary interfaces to be used to access and manage storage.

The annual Oracle Open World (OOW) conference is fast approaching and is sure to be bigger and better than ever this year. With more than 40,000 attendees expected, it will again be the biggest conference held in San Francisco during 2010. Why so many attendees, many of whom make it an annual ritual? Why should you attend? Here are just a few reasons, in no particular order, that I haven’t missed an OOW in at least 8 years.