Oracle talks up 'full stack' virtualisation

Oracle's acquisition of Sun strengthened its virtualisation hand

Oracle has begun a push for its integrated virtualisation platforms, and in the process blasted one of its biggest competitors.

The company said in a webcast presentation that its "full stack" virtualisation approach could provide better value and performance over competing offerings such as VMware.

Chief corporate architect Edward Screven said the company's approach involves placing virtualisation systems in nearly every level of the IT infrastructure, from application level to storage level.

In doing so, Screven suggested that Oracle could enable IT departments to better manage tasks such as application deployment and storage management.

"Datacentres are running away from becoming fixed installations; datacentres are becoming service centres," he said.

"There is an evolution happening, just a hypervisor approach is not enough."

In an obvious dig at VMware, Oracle said that by combining the hypervisor with other systems, IT departments could set themselves up for headaches.

"There is no other company on the planet that has the complete breadth of virtualisation technologies that Oracle has," said Screven.

"You can cobble together your own solution out of piece parts, but if you do that your management costs are going to be higher, your reliability is going to be much lower [and] your costs are going to be far higher."

According to analysts, Oracle's claims are not without merit.

Clabby Analytics president Joe Clabby told V3.co.uk that in areas such as mainframe virtualisation and Unix systems, Oracle could hold a definite advantage over VMware, due in large part to its broad set of IT platforms and services in the wake of its merger with Sun Microsystems.

"System vendors build virtualisation into operating environments, and now Oracle is a systems vendor," Clabby said.

"It has a long history because of Sun."

Oracle's full stack approach could have its drawbacks, however. IDC enterprise virtualisation software manager Gary Chen told V3.co.uk that Oracle's all-in-one approach could limit the platform's appeal to enterprises that aren't already Oracle customers.

"The main problem right now is that their virtualisation platform is very heavily tied to the rest of the Oracle stack," said the analyst.

"I would like to see Oracle expand its virtualisation platform to some other platforms beyond themselves."