Oracle to offer infrastructure-as-a-service in private cloud form

Oracle has unveiled a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform which will allow users to purchase appliances on a monthly payment plan.

The company said that its IaaS brand would include its private cloud Exalytics, ExaData and ExaLogic brands as well as the Sun ZFS storage appliance and Sparc SuperCluster hardware.

Under the new pricing plan, businesses will be able to pay under a monthly subscription plan rather than purchase hardware up-front. The result, said Oracle, is a finance model which brings the operating expense benefits of cloud service subscriptions while maintaining the benefits of on-premise hardware and private cloud deployments.

The platform will also include Oracle's Capacity on Demand service which will allow for companies to temporarily add to their processing power in periods of peak demand.

"For the first time, customers can get the unmatched performance, scalability and reliability of Oracle Engineered Systems deployed on premise, behind their firewall, for a monthly fee,” said Oracle senior vice president for software development Juan Loaiza.

"Oracle IaaS with elastic compute Capacity on Demand makes it possible for customers to use, and pay for peak processing power only when they need it, and get the highest level of support with the new Oracle PlatinumPlus Services."

The hardware lineup will include many of Oracle's recent high-profile hardware releases. The company has positioned Exalytics as its platform of choice in the in-memory database space, while ExaData and ExaLogic systems have been upgraded to run traditional database and application server platforms.

Additionally, the company has sought to hype up the resurgence of the Sparc brand as a formidable player in the server processor space.