Larry Ellison Just Embraced the Enemy. Or Did He? - Wired

One of the defining features of cloud computing is multitenancy â€" the ability to take data and applications from multiple users and run them not just on the same hardware but often on the same software.

It’s a way of making computing tasks more efficient. But last year, at his company’s annual OpenWorld trade show in San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison slammed the idea â€" in no uncertain terms. “That’s a very bad security model,” he said. “It’s called multitenancy, and it was state of the art 15 years ago.” This was a way of belittling one of Oracle’s primary rivals, Salesforce.com, which built its entire business on multitenancy.

Then came this year’s installment of Oracle OpenWorld, where Ellison unveiled an infrastructure cloud service along the lines of Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine as well as a cloud database called 12c. Both services feature â€" you guessed it â€" multitenancy. Ellison even had the gall to call 12c the first multitenant database, conveniently omitting the fact that Salesforce.com has offered an Oracle-based multitenant cloud database called Database.com since 2010.

This was hardly a surprise. Ellison has a history of adopting technologies he once belittled. In 2011, Oracle belittled the idea of “NoSQL,” and just months later, the company launched “Oracle NoSQL” â€" a repackaged version of Oracle’s existing Berkley DB product running on the Oracle Big Data Appliance. But you have to wonder how seriously Oracle takes these apparent changes in tack.

Oracle may say it’s moving to the cloud, but what it really wants to do is sell the world hardware and software. In announcing those new cloud services, Ellison said that Oracle will help you set up and manage these same services inside your own data center. Like the other big IT giants, Oracle is offering you both the old world and the new. But that’s easier said than done.

What is cloud computing? That’s a hard question to answer. But it boils down to a few things:

• Elasticity: The ability to use varying amounts of computing resources and to meter that usage to ensure you pay for only what you use.
• Multitenancy: Part of what makes elasticity possible is the pooling of resources through multitenancy.
• Horizontal scaling: Cloud computing environments tend to scale “out” rather than “up,” meaning that instead of replacing servers with bigger and better ones, they add more servers to the cluster.

Amazon and Google helped popularize the idea of scale-out by running clusters of inexpensive servers running open source software. It’s was the best way to reduce their costs in the data center. Both companies built custom databases optimized for scale-out environments â€" Dynamo and BigTable respectively â€" and wide spread interest in these scale-out architectures helped kick start the cloud computing and NoSQL movements.

Now, Oracle says it’s embracing elasticity and multitenancy. But scale out conflicts with Oracle’s strategy in ways that resource metering and multitenancy don’t. Oracle doesn’t want companies buying cheap “pizza box” servers running open source databases. It wants to sell big, expensive hardware bundled with expensive software licenses to companies trying to build their cloud architectures. While the Oracle Big Data Appliance contains non-relational database technology, it’s unlike other NoSQL products in that it’s not built with scale-out in mind.

Public cloud customers theoretically don’t need to care all that much about whether their providers are scaling up or scaling out, so long as the pricing is competitive and the service actually scales. So Oracle might be able to be competitive here if it can keep its costs down and manage the infrastructure well. But it’s going to have a tough time competing on price with other vendors â€" whether its in the cloud or in private data centers.

Does that mean Oracle is completely behind the times? Hardly. The irony is that Salesforce.com is still a huge Oracle customer. Salesforce.com’s services rely heavily on a highly customized version of Oracle Database. Meanwhile, Amazon’s RDS service offers Oracle Database in the cloud. Oracle remains a key player as a supplier to “real” cloud companies, even if it lags in selling its own cloud services.

But those are just software offerings, not hardware. And Oracle is very much wedded to a massive hardware business.

In 2008, Ellison said just about anything could be labeled “cloud computing,” and later, as if to prove his point, he started referring to Oracle’s massive Exadata hardware as “my cloud.” Is Oracle’s new cloud really new? Or is it the same old schtick?