By Tony Baer, Prinicpal Analyst, Ovum Enterprise Solutions

Summary

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud 2.0 (“Exalogic”) adds features that will make the system better suited for its role as a cloud deployment target. It adds server virtualisation capabilities that accelerate provisioning and deliver the expected elasticity.

A new lightweight virtualisation engine optimised for Oracle workloads improves application performance. This comes atop incremental enhancements to existing features such as Oracle Exabus.

The importance of the 2.0 release is not necessarily in the individual improvements, but rather in how they help the system live up to its original “elastic cloud” branding.

So far, Oracle has successfully sold Exalogic to its installed base, primarily as the middleware complement to the Exadata database platform and as the infrastructure for its business applications.

Oracle has promoted the “soft” business benefits, such as improved responsiveness and efficiency that comes from its engineered systems, but it …