A crude JMS performance comparison between different WebLogic server persistence stores

When it comes to persisting service and subsystems data (i.e. JMS), WebLogic server offers customers a choice: filesystem or relational database using JDBC.  Persistence store has implications on WLS performance and systems management.  In this post, I will provide an unofficial JMS performance comparison using different persistence stores.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not an official Oracle performance benchmark.  It is just intended as an example to give readers an idea about possible performance differences when considering different persistent stores.

WebLogic persistence store provides a high-performance and transactional store for those WebLogic services and subsystems that need to store their data.  As an example, WebLogic JMS uses the persistence store for storing persistent messages and transmission of messages between Store-And-Forward (SAF) agents. 

The persistence store plays an important role in performance and high-availability of WebLogic applications and topology.  There are also considerations for management of  the persistence store.

In this blog, I will be sharing metrics from the following scenarios:

1. WebLogic server JMS performance using default persistence store (filesystem)
2. WebLogic server JMS performance using a  local DB persistence store
3. WebLogic server JMS performance using a remote DB persistence store

In all cases, WLS version 12.1.2 was running in a Windows 7 (64-bit) environment on a Dell Pecision M6600 with i7-2920xm cpu @ 2.5 and  16G RAM.  I used the bundled, 64-bit Hotspot JVM with default heap: Xms256m Xmx512m.

In the second case, I used Oracle DB EE version 11.2.0.1 in the same Windows 7 environment as WLS.  Again, all default settings.

In the third scenario, I used a remote Oracle DB EE version 12.1.0 on a 64-bit machine running OEL v5 under OVM.  The average ping between the Windows and Linux servers was 45 ms.

For the testing, I used a standalone JMS client application to send WLS 1K, 4K, 16K, and 64K persistent messages.  In each run,  the client instantiated 4 concurrent threads to send 1000 messages to WLS (250 messages / thread).  The client ran local to the WLS server, and between each test, all the messages in the JMS queue was cleared.

Here is a summary of average message throughput for each scenario:

So, what is the key take-away from the stats above?  When using a local database, as the size of the message grows, you may see performance degradation of up 123.02% for a 64K message.   When you compare this with the remote database, it took more than 3600 times longer to commit 1000 64K messages to JMS persistence store backed by the remote DB...

So, what is the right persistence store strategy for you?  There are a lot of considerations.  Please take a look at  Using the WebLogic Persistence Store for considerations and limitations.  Also, as I said, I used vanilla, out-of-the-box parameters for this test.  You should consult Tuning the WebLogic persistence store for configuration and best practices.  

WebLogic Server 12c RESTful Management Services

WebLogic Server (WLS) 12c delivers over 200 new features and enhancements.  With 12c, Oracle extended the WebLogic Management Framework with a set of RESTful management services.  These services provide a light-weight and flexible interface for monitoring WebLogic Server.  In this post, I will describe how to use this interface.

In 12c, Oracle added REST interface for managing WLS resources.  In 12.1.2, this interface allows administrators to monitor WLS resources (servers, clusters, applications, datasources) in any environment where a basic HTTP library is available for communicating with WebLogic admin server, and a DOM or JSON library exists for handling request/response messages.

Please refer to Administering Oracle WebLogic Server with RESTful Management Services for an overview of this feature and how to enable it.  If you don’t have access to the WebLogic admin console, refer to doc 1565067.1 to enable this using WLST.

Interface Design

WLS RESTful Management Service was designed based on a common REST design pattern (singular and plural nouns).  In WLS RESTful interface, there are two types of resources: a singular resource (item) and a set of resources (collection).    

As an example, if you want to see the collection of servers running in WLS, you'd use the following resource url:  http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/servers

If you want to get information about a specific server, you'd use the following:

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/servers/AppServer1

Similarly, you'd use the same URLs to reference other resources:

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/clusters

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/clusters/{cluster name}

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/applications

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/applications/{application name}

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/datasources

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/datasources/{datasource name}

As of WLS 12.1.2, you can only use HTTP GET to retrieve information about resources described above. Compared to WLST, this is currently very limited.  In future releases of WLS, the list of supported resources and types of operations by WLS REST Management Service MAY be expanded.  This is not a guarantee or statement of product direction.  If you are interested in this feature, please tune in to WLS product management blog for future announcements.

Media-Types & Usecases

WLS RESTful Management Service supports “representation” of resources in HTML, XML, and JSON.  The representation refers to the format of the response message sent from WebLogic back to client.  

In the request message, client uses the “Accept” HTTP header to tell WebLogic how to encode the response message.  In the response message, WebLogic indicates the format of the response in Content-Type response header:

HTML Encoded Response

JSON Encoded Response

XML Encoded Response

So, what is the right format to choose?   This is an important question which depends on your usecase and the programming environment.

At the most basic level, as an example, you may be in a situation where you need to provide WLS server status for "level-1" operations support team.   All you have to do is to embed an HTML fragment in a custom monitoring dashboard to show the status of WLS servers.  For this scenario, the HTML encoded response may meet the  requirements without any programming efforts.

At the next level, the requirements may be a little more sophisticated.  After you call the service, you may need to parse the response and show only the desired values, and in a specific format. In this case, you may choose the JSON format to be used in a Javascript environment.

Finally, the requirements may be more sophisticated in terms of parsing, data validation, programming environment... and the usecase/application may even involve receiving data from other enterprise IT resources with limitations on data formats...  In this case, it may make sense to standardize on XML.

Sample Code

As I was getting ready to share some sample code in Python and Java to get you started, I found the following blog post http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/oliveira-wls-rest-javafx-1723982.html. It provides an excellent programming reference with sample code. 

Conclusion

With customers developing, testing, and managing applications and servers on-premise and in the cloud, WLS REST Management Service provides a uniform way for developing custom management solutions wherever the resources are running.   The interface is easy to understand and use, and it doesn't require any WLS runtime jar files to run...   

If you are interested to learn more about the new features in WLS 12c, take a look at this recent whitepaper by WLS product management. 

Oracle Java Cloud Service SDK

Oracle Java Cloud Service (JCS) is a Platform-as-a-Service built on top of WebLogic Server and other Fusion Middleware solutions (i.e. Identity Management). The platform is powered by ExaLogic and ExaData for elasticity, performance, and high availability.

You can build and deploy different kinds of enterprise java apps (i.e. servlets, web services) on JCS as long as you comply with its API restrictions. Since the foundation of Java Cloud Service is WebLogic, you can build and test your application locally in Eclipse (WLS 12.1.2 and above) and when ready deploy to JCS. JCS is part of a broader portfolio of Oracle’s Cloud offerings.

JCS offers a UI for application lifecycle management and monitoring. These capabilities are also available from Oracle Java Cloud SDK.   After you download the SDK, take a look at its directory structure and content:

The samples directory contains a set of applications (based on JEE 6 tutorial) with instructions on how to build and deploy them on Oracle JCS.  Take a look at readme.txt and ee-samples.readme.txt to get started.

Next, take a look at the doc directory to see how to use the SDK to build, deploy, and manage the applications locally and also on JCS.

The lib directory contains the SDK jar utilities to support application development and management tasks.
These include ANT tasks and Maven plugins to facilitate development automation.  The SDK also provides a command-line interface to perform application development, lifecycle management, and monitoring.
It is important to note that these tools can also be run against a local WebLogic server to support typical cloud development and deployment scenarios.
Take a look at index.html in the doc directory to learn more about the tools and their usage.

After the installation of the SDK, you can invoke the command-line interface using  java –jar javacloud.jar without specifying any parameters. This will print a list of available commands:

You can use java –jar javacloud.jar usage to print a help page about the tool:

Have a look at the page. It provides more details about the available commands, usage and parameters.
As an example, you can monitor the status of your jobs on the platform as follows:

-u specifies the userid when you registered with the service
-p specifies the password when you registered with the service
-identitydomain specifies the identity domain when the service was provisioned
-datacenter is the datacenter where your service was provisioned (i.e. us1, us2, em1, em2, ap1, ap2)

When you sign up for Oracle Java Cloud service and activate the service, you will receive a welcome email containing the information above.

The parameters above can be stored in a javacloud.properties under the user's home directory.  The only exception is password.  When you run the commands, the SDK will prompt you to enter a password:

Administrators can use the various commands to install/start/stop/delete or monitor the status of applications.

For developers, the SDK can be configured in Eclipse (OEPE), for application management and monitoring as follows.

Start by creating a new Oracle Cloud server:

JDeveloper and NetBeans are also supported.  Refer to Oracle Java Cloud Service welcome email to specify the parameters.   

If you specify the correct configuration parameters, you should be able to see your JCS environment under the server's tab as follows:

After the JCS environment is configured, you can publish your applications to JCS, manage them, and monitor statistics.

Oracle is making a lot of investments in cloud research and development.  With WebLogic as the foundation of Java Cloud Service, and the common tooling that supports both on-premise WebLogic as well as JCS, customers can use their preferred IDE (OEPE, JDeveloper, NetBeans) to develop and test locally and deploy to JCS without any code changes - or - use JCS to do all the development and testing, and deploy to production servers on-premise. This brings cost and time efficiencies to development and testing.  There are additional customer benefits, as JCS abstracts the underlying WebLogic and FMW stack taking the ownership and responsibility for installation, configuration, operations, patch management, performance, SLA, ... away from customers.  

For more information about Java Cloud Service, visit Java Cloud Service documentation.

A brief look at Oracle and its Cloud Strategy

For the last couple of years, Oracle has shown a consistent strategy to Cloud Computing.  It has made strategic acquisitions such as Virtual Iron to gain x86 virtualization management software, and has also made investments in new products such as Virtual Assembly Builder to facilitate configuration and governance of virtual environments.

Oracle has made clear that it intends to be a provider of technology to both enterprise customers and service providers.  That it does not plan to be a public cloud provider/operator like AWS or Savvis.  Instead, Oracle works with public cloud services as a distribution and delivery partner. 

[Note: See AWS/Oracle announcement of  support for Oracle middleware and apps on EC2 using Oracle VM images.]

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This post is a brief look at Oracle and its cloud strategy.  First, I will review Oracle business, financial, and what it brings to Cloud Computing.  Next, I will provide a 5-minute SWOT analysis of Oracle Cloud Strategy.

Oracle business

Oracle’s goal is to be the world’s most complete, open and integrated enterprise software and hardware company.  In FY2010, it booked more than $26B in revenue.  The company breaks down its revenue as follows:

• Software
• New software sales
• Software license renewals & support contract
• Hardware
• Hardware sales
• Hardware support & maintenance contract
• Services
• Consulting
• Education
• On Demand

Here is their revenue trend for the last 5 years:

• Oracle made over 32% of its 2010 total revenue ($26,821 million) from database & middleware renewal, and about 16% from Fusion apps renewal.  This is due to the fact that almost 90% of Oracle customers renew contracts.   [Renewal has a margin of 85%, and is the key factor to Oracle’s overall profitability.]
• Oracle’s On Demand, which is where it offers hosted Fusion application, has also contributed to about 3% of total revenue.  This segment has shown steady growth.  In fact, since 2005, it has grown almost 3 times.  [This is a key area to future growth for Oracle especially considering all the investments they have been making to standardize Fusion apps on Fusion middleware and continue to “SaaSify” the applications.]

Oracle Cloud Business Strategy

As stated earlier, Oracle intends to be primarily a Cloud technology provider/enabler as opposed to a service operator.  This was further evidenced as it halted the rollout plans for Project Caroline after the Sun acquisition.

For enterprise customers, Oracle is addressing the needs for private cloud by providing integrated machines such as Exadata and Exalogic.  These machines help customers consolidate workloads and scale up/down as demand grows.  Oracle also continues with new products and enhancement of its middleware and enterprise management solution to enable customers build private clouds on their own hardware.

I think Oracle will be forced to change their cloud strategy for the following reasons:

• According to analysts, about 10% of IT budget is spent on external cloud services and that percentage will keep growing (see Gartner’s survey).  Oracle needs to pay attention to this shift in enterprise IT spending, if it plans to increase marketshare and revenue.  Large customers struggle with supporting workloads in the cloud, so they look for a vendor to not only help them move workloads to the Cloud, but also provide support and management.  So, they look for hosted managed private clouds.  Oracle could address this need by leveraging Sun assets such as Caroline to offer such services.  This would position it well for future growth.   
• It is common knowledge that Oracle wants to reach $100B in revenue in the next 10 years.  Cloud Computing, including integrated systems, is a key growth strategy for Oracle.    Oracle needs to diversify to reach that level of revenue in the next decade.  It can’t rely on acquisitions to make that happen.  Let’s assume Oracle acquires CA.  That would only boost Oracle’s revenue by $4B.  

Sidebar: Let’s play the following scenario.  Let’s assume that on average with every Exalogic Oracle charges $1M for hardware and $3M for software. Furthermore, let’s assume a %20 maintenance revenue per box / year.  If Oracle sold 1000 units every year for the next 3 years, they would book a total of $12B in combined new hardware and software + $4B in maintenance.  Everything else constant, by 2014, Oracle’s revenue would grow by $16B to $42B.  Can they do that? 

Oracle Cloud Solution

The following diagram describes Oracle’s cloud solution model:

Oracle models its solutions based on different Cloud service offering.   The diagram is pretty self-explanatory.  At the IaaS level, Oracle Sun hardware,  and virtualization technologies (Virtual Iron + Sun).  Oracle offers other capabilities that are not listed in this diagram such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Oracle VM Virtual Box.

In the PaaS layer, Oracle uses a combination of virtualization to isolate workloads and management deployment + grid technologies to enable dynamic resources and scaling for applications.

At the top layer, Oracle and non-Oracle apps can be deployed on this platform.  Oracle Fusion apps are optimized for Oracle Fusion middleware. 

Finally, on the right hand side, there is the management layer…The slide is a cut and paste of Richard Sarwal’s presentation at Oracle OpenWorld.  In that presentation, Richard also mentioned that there other capabilities and solution that Oracle will be offering in the next year (i.e. self-service portal, metering & charge-back, etc)

Oracle Cloud SWOT

In terms of integrated systems, Oracle will face competition primarily from IBM CloudBurst and Acadia.  On the middleware side, IBM offers a similar set of offerings based on WebSphere and Tivoli (i.e. WebSphere CloudBurst, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, Tivoli Cloud Management stack).   Oracle will face competition from VMware vFabric.   IBM has embraced VMware as a virtualization partner (on x86)whereas Oracle decided to acquire its own virtualization.  That has been a source of friction between the two vendors.

In terms of deployment and support, IBM offers more choices than Oracle:

• IBM & Oracle both offer enterprise-owned cloud
• IBM offers managed private cloud services (using customers assets), but Oracle does not.  A customer would have to get a managed services contract from an Oracle partner like Wipro.
• IBM offers IBM-hosted private cloud, but Oracle does not.  A customer would have to sign a contract with an Oracle Cloud provider like Savvis that offers both hosting and support services.
• IBM offers a public cloud where multiple tenants share the same infrastructure. This is useful for certain workloads (i.e. email, public website) and cloud scenarios (development and testing).  Oracle doesn’t offer that.  A customer would have to find a Pay-As-You-Go provider like AWS.

So, here is a quick SWOT of Oracle Cloud:

Let me know what you think? 

Do you think Oracle can reach $100B in the next 10 years through an acquisition only strategy?   What other challenges do you see in Oracle’s cloud strategy, and selling its middleware machine into the enterprise?

A review and analysis of IBM Test & Development Cloud, and opportunities

IBM finally GA'd its Development & Test Cloud last week: http://www.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise
In addition to a public cloud service offering, IBM is also providing an option to deploy such an infrastructure-as-a-service model on-premise (private cloud): http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/midware/a1030965

I believe Cloud Computing is critical to IBM’s future growth.  It may even be the only solution to declining revenues in some of IBM’s business segments.    I will share some opinions below after a quick solution review.

The IBM cloud is built on Rational & Tivoli components.  Rational provides design, development, testing, and application lifecycle management & governance, and Tivoli enables automated resource provisioning & service management (self-service request management, performance monitoring, usage metering, billing):

IBM Test & Development Cloud

I think there is an opportunity for IBM’s Cloud to be a huge success for the following reasons:

Virtualization
For IBM public cloud, KVM powers the virtualization layer.  The on-premise solution is virtualization technology agnostic: KVM, PowerVM, and VMWare.

• In a previous post, I made the observation that most large enterprises cannot standardize on a single virtualization infrastructure.  They have to deal with multiple virtualization technologies.   While there seems to be some gaps in IBM’s on-premise solution (ex. no Xen or Hyper-V support), I think IBM is in a much better position than VMWare or Oracle to unify management across different virtualization technologies.   This would be a a big competitive differentiator and value to the enterprise.
• Secondly, in the world of Cloud Computing, vendors are primarily focused on x-86 platform.  All other platforms are ignored.  If IBM can extend their public cloud to support pSeries and maybe even zSeries (mainframe-as-a-service ?), this would also be a huge competitive differentiator.  This would allow more workloads to be moved to the Cloud and benefit customers.  As an example, customers would be able to move some of their mainframe batch jobs to the Cloud to save MIPS.

OS Coverage
The initial set of OS images are limited. In the initial public offering, IBM only offers Red Hat & Novell images.  There are no Windows images (yet ?).  I think it is just a matter of time for IBM to offer Windows images on their public cloud.

As I said above, the on-premise solution can support AIX images now, and maybe zOS in the near future (why not?).  If IBM were to offer AIX & zOS VMs in the Cloud, it would not only be able to realize a new revenue stream and possibly revive that segment, but keep customers from migrating to other platforms.  I think this could open new opportunities.  The challenge is how to do this in a balanced way without cannibalizing the existing customer base, and creating incentives for IBM sales teams to execute after those opportunities.

Pricing
IBM’s cloud “infrastructure pricing” is competitive to AWS.  However, for IBM software, there are different licensing & subscription options:

Customer scenarios	Software	Infrastructure
	Charge	Charge
You "bring your own IBM license" ("BYOL")	Prepaid for software license	Per VM per hour
You own an IBM software license and can use the pre-built IBM images in the portal catalog
You "pay-as-you-go" ("PAYG")	Per Image per hour	Per VM per hour
You choose the desired software, accept the license terms online, and receive a monthly usage bill
You "bring your own software and licenses"	Prepaid for software licenses	Per VM per hour
You bring your own software or software for which you hold valid licenses and install them on the servers you provision
You want to test "pre-release" software	No charge for restricted use	Per VM per hr
From time to time, pre-released software images will be made available on a temporary basis for test (non-productive) use
You are an eligible ISV/SI developer	No charge or by usage	Per VM per hr
You can use selected IBM "development use only" ("DUO") software for development, test, proof of concept and sales demos on the IBM Cloud
Options available vary by software package.

IBM hasn’t published detailed pricing on their software subscription pricing (PAYG), but it would be a fair to assume it will be less than what they charge on Amazon.  [N.B. on AWS, IBM only offers a very small subset of its software primarily targeting ISVs for development & testing as opposed to enterprise customers.]
Now, let’s talk about the market and the opportunity for IBM.

Market maturity, opportunity & customer addressability
Since the recession a couple of years ago, Cloud Computing has gained more momentum in the enterprise.  IDC estimates spending on Cloud services in the range of $42B by 2012. 
If you look at early Cloud providers such as Amazon or Google, while I have enormous respect and appreciation for the innovation and technical design and delivery of the services, I argue they haven’t been able to gain traction in the enterprise space.  The only exception is SalesForce.com [take a look towards the bottom of this post.].  They have done well, because the founder had an enterprise software background.

As an example, if you look at Google’s enterprise business in 2009, it booked around $209M (that includes revenue from their search appliance + Google Apps).  In a previous post, I estimated AWS revenue to be around $200M / year.    If you compare these numbers with IBM SWG, MSFT or Oracle software revenues, I think it would be easy to conclude they haven’t captured a big marketshare in the enterprise space.  I think this is fundamentally due to their lack of business relationship, partnerships, and investments in sales & marketing.

So, I think this is a good time for IBM to enter the market.

In terms of opportunity and access to market, IBM is a global company with delivery centers around the world. It has business segments that align well with customers considering or transitioning to Cloud Computing. To understand the potential opportunity for IBM better, let's look at some numbers. 

IBM Development & Test Cloud is an offering from Global Technology Services (GTS):

The numbers above are in millions.  In 2009, GTS revenue was around $37B with a gross margin of around 35%.

There are several business lines in GTS:

• Strategic Outsourcing (SO) – This segment offers outsourcing services to commercial and public sector.  In 2009, IBM’s SO revenue was $19.3B.
• Integrated Technology Services (ITS) – This segment offers different IT services (project based) from IT strategy –> middleware services –> infrastructure services.  In 2009, ITS’ revenue was $8.7B.
• Business Transformation Outsourcing (BTO) – This segment focuses primarily on business process outsourcing (BPO), and “IT transformation” services.  In 2009, BTO’s revenue was $2.2B.
• Maintenance – This segment offers product maintenance and support services.  In 2009, GTS maintenance revenue contribution was almost $7B.

IBM has C-level relationships in Fortune companies in all industries.   Some of these companies have already entrusted IBM with their IT infrastructure and mission critical systems.  This puts IBM in a huge advantage over other service providers. 

As SO contracts are renewed, and as ITS engages customers in IT strategy and middleware services, IBM should also be able to harvest opportunities for both private cloud as well as public cloud. 

[N.B.  The cool thing about Cloud services is that they are not like SO contracts (i.e. fixed).  Once you sign up a customer, as long as you’re meeting your SLAs, and manage the offering in terms of features/capabilities, you should be able to maintain a profitable recurring revenue stream (i.e. reduced sales & marketing costs, reduced infrastructure costs through efficient multi-tenant delivery).]

Consider this....If IBM were to convert 10% of 2009 GTS revenue from existing base to Cloud, let's say over the next 3 years, they would make about $3B in Cloud revenue by 2013…Now, that’s revenue & marketshare.

Here is another reason why Cloud could help IBM.    IBM Software Group booked $22B of revenue in 2009:

SWG revenue breaks down as follows:

• Cross-brand middleware:  This is combined revenue from WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus, Rational, Information Management worth over $12B.  IBM doesn’t break down the revenue by brand. 
• Other middleware: This include legacy middleware such as CICS & IMS.  IBM made over $4.6B there.
• Operating Systems: This includes software such as zOS, AIX, AS/400, & TPF.  In 2009, the OS revenue was > $2.1B.  This is dependent on how IBM’s hardware group (Systems & Technology Group) performs.
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): I think it is a joint venture with Dassault Systems.
• Other: This includes all IBM Software Group services (aka Lab services).  In 2009, the revenue for this part was $1.4B.

As you can see above, except for lab services, x-brand middleware is the only segment that’s been reporting growth. There are two reasons for this:

• Acquisitions: IBM has made some big acquisitions in this space: (i.e. Cognos for $5B, FileNet for $1.7B, Sterling Commerce for $1.2B…).  Acquisitions help IBM book new business.
• Renewal rates: This is recurring revenue from existing customers.  I was told by a software sales exec, average renewal rates for a successful enterprise software company is around 98% (depending on the product, maturity, etc).   So, this is helping IBM SWG maintain revenue and marketshare.

I haven’t heard of any new notable products out of SWG lately.  So, looking at the above, I think it is fair to conclude acquisitions have been the primary vehicle for growth in SWG.  So, with Cloud Computing, SWG  should be able to develop a new revenue stream.

So, for SWG, I think Cloud Computing can offer the following benefits:

• Use Cloud as a sales & delivery channel for SMB.  This would be very helpful to IBM.
• Offer a viable alternative to clients looking at other sourcing options
• In the beginning, I think Cloud can offer a parallel revenue stream for SWG particularly for WebSphere, Tivoli, and Rational
• Compete with other private cloud vendors and public cloud service providers
• Partners and alliances help IBM realize almost a third of its total revenue.  SWG gains a lot from these GSIs and ISVs.  SWG can offer new solutions to these partners to help grow its revenue.  Also, help ISVs cloudify their solutions.

All of the above should help IBM sustain growth.

[N.B. There is some difference between private and public clouds in terms of revenue.
Software is a high margin business.  In the case of IBM SWG, the gross margin for SWG was 86%.  The reason for this is software licensing & maintenance costs.  With public clouds, this is radically different. It is a volume business.  For IBM to be profitable in the public cloud space, they must sign up more and more customers.  On the private cloud side, they should be able to do better.]
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IBM is building a good story here.  From SWG side, with WebSphere CloudBurst, the recent acquisition of Cast Iron, and Rational Software Delivery Services, IBM is putting together all the asset to enable Cloud Computing for the enterprise.  On the GTS side, IBM is in a good position to create opportunities, and work with enterprise customers to help transition to Cloud.

Finally, from a competitive perspective, in the enterprise space (as opposed to consumer space), I don’t think IBM needs to worry too much about AWS or Google.  As long as IBM prices its public cloud offerings from GTS, Lotus, etc competitively, and maintain a close relationship with enterprise accounts, I think they should be able to do OK.

In the enterprise space, I think SWG should keep an eye on Oracle and VMWare on one side, and MSFT on the other.  GTS will have to worry about the usual competitors such as CSC, HP/EDS, etc...

Oracle, AmberPoint, and the SOA Management ecosystem

Earlier this morning, Oracle announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire AmberPoint.  AmberPoint will be integrated and managed under Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division, and over time will be ported to the EM management framework.

For both existing customers and new prospects, this is positive news on many levels (i.e. broader/deeper capabilities after integration with EM, removing any doubts or concerns over vendor financial stability, product viability, solution’s strategic fit in the enterprise, etc).  AmberPoint will fill the gaps in Oracle’s SOA management capabilities today, and should play a key role for Oracle Cloud management in the future. With Oracle’s sales and distribution channels, AmberPoint will be able to reach new markets and extend market share.

In SOA management business, AmberPoint and SOA Software were the only key niche players left.  This acquisition puts Oracle in direct competition with SOA Software.  It will end the Oracle and SOA software partnership.  Looking forward, SOA Software is likely either going to get acquired – or - has to figure out a different product and partner strategy to compete. 

In terms of acquisition, the usual suspects for SOA Software include IBM, Microsoft, CA, HP, BMC or possibly even SAP.   Any of these vendors should be able to take their solutions and integrate them as part of a broader ESM/BSM solution.  SOA Software assets could help accelerate with that.  As far as product strategy, I think SOA Software will have to break away from just “SOA management” targeting enterprise customers into broader Cloud management also targeting Cloud service providers: self-service, asset/portfolio management, Cloud operational governance (quota, policies, SLA, billing, …) configuration, provisioning, automation…  They can do some of that on their own or go to market with new partners.

In summary, Oracle’s acquisition is definitely good for customers.  It also forces the other player to consider solutions and strategies.

Oracle unveils its plans for Sun

Last week, Oracle held a series of webcasts to communicate details on their product strategy with regards to the Sun acquisition.  They unveiled plans for hardware, software, systems, industry solutions, and partner strategies.  The webcasts were delivered by some of the most senior folks in Oracle and Sun, and they disclosed a lot of specific information, which was necessary for both customers and partners after nine months of uncertainty and speculations.

The webcasts followed a similar format.  First, they began with Oracle’s strategy and approach to acquisition.  In this section, they emphasized the following points:

• Oracle’s strategy of providing complete, integrated “systems” based on open standards
• Oracle’s commitment to protect and enhance existing customer investments
• Fast transition and integration of systems, processes, and relationships to better serve customers

Next, they reviewed existing Oracle assets and product strategy in the specific technology domain, and Sun’s relative fit.

The following provides a summary from Oracle’s software strategy webcasts.

Java Strategy: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)  & Jeet Kaul (Sun VP of Software Group)

There were no surprises here. The importance of Java (JVM platform, Java language, dynamic languages, Java SE, Java EE, Java ME…) including some interesting facts/figures vis-a-vis industry adoption rates and usage were highlighted. 

Key points:

• Continued support for Java, JCP, and developer community
• Continued investment in Java across different servers and devices
• Sun Java HotSpot & JRocket will continue to be strategic JVMs
• GlassFish will continue as a reference implementation and open source project
• Oracle plans to offer GlassFish as part of multiple commercial Java EE server offerings
• JavaOne will be co-located with Oracle OpenWorld, and will also be offered in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

Operating Systems: Edward Screven (Oracle Chief Corporate Architect) & John Fowler (Sun VP of Systems)

As of a year ago or so, Oracle started offering its own Linux distro.  The Oracle Enterprise Linux is positioned at the bottom of Oracle’s integrated stack, the infrastructure layer, sitting next to its Oracle VM.  with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle now adds another operating system to its portfolio (Solaris) running on SPARC or X86 hardware. 

N.B. Solaris also has some unique virtualization capabilities that will be integrated/consolidated in Oracle VM solution.

The key points in this webcast were as follows:

• Oracle’s commitment to Oracle Enterprise Linux and community
• Oracle’s commitment to Solaris and community
• Platform choice and flexibility ==> customer value
• Long history of collaboration between Sun and Oracle.  Now united as one, they can work more effectively, share IP and accelerate innovation

Virtualization: Edward Screven (Oracle Chief Corporate Architect)

Back in May of 2009, the acquisition of Virtual Iron enabled Oracle to enter the server virtualization market.  Now, with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle expands its portfolio to new technologies in server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and storage virtualization.

In this category, Oracle plans to consolidate/integrate virtualization technologies from Sun with Oracle VM.  It will continue investment and support for Solaris virtualization (i.e. logical domains, containers).  It will enhance Oracle VM Manager to monitor and manage virtual Solaris environments. (In the future, the plans are to fold Ops Center with Enterprise Manager).  In addition, Oracle VM hypervisor will be enhanced to support Solaris guests on X86 platform. 

In terms of provisioning support, Oracle VM templates will be enhanced to support Solaris virtual images. 

On the desktop side, Sun’s VDI solution will be renamed to Oracle VDI.  Oracle VM will be updated to support Oracle Virtual Desktops.  Also, Oracle plans interoperability enhancements between Oracle VM and Sun VirtualBox (Oracle VM VirtualBox).

The key points in this webcast were that Oracle plans to integrate and rationalize virtualization technologies from Sun with Oracle VM.   It will continue investment in Solaris and SPARC virtualization, but plans to consolidate virtualization management on Oracle VM as a strategic product.  Finally, Oracle VM is the only certified and supported server virtualization platform for all Oracle software.

Cloud Computing: Richard Sarwal  (Oracle SVP Enterprise Manager)

In this webcast, Richard Sarwal described Oracle’s view of Cloud Computing, and their strategy.  Here are the key points in this webcast:

• There is an enterprise maturity model or approach to Cloud Computing:
  • Siol’d: Physical/Dedicated Resources
  • Grid: Virtual, shared services, dynamic resources, standard appliances
  • Private Cloud: Self-service portal, policy-based provisioning and resource management, chargeback
  • Hybrid Cloud: Federation with Public Clouds, interoperability, bursting…
• Oracle is a technology provider to customers to enable Cloud journey
• Oracle is also a technology provider to service providers
• Sun’s Public Cloud (Project Caroline) is terminated immediately, but some of the assets will be rolled other products (i.e. Q-layer into Enterprise Manager)

Enterprise Manager & Ops Center: Richard Sarwal  (Oracle SVP Enterprise Manager) & Steve Wilson (Sun - VP Engineering, Ops Center)

In this webcast, Richard Sarwal & Steve Wilson laid out the integration strategy and consolidation of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Ops Center.  Here are the key points:

• There is little overlap between two products
• Oracle Enterprise Manager is Oracle’s strategic product
• In the short-term, Oracle plans to support and maintain both products and provide connectors to integrate the two.  Over time the products will be integrated into one systems management offering (Enterprise Manager)

Application Server: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

Here are the key points:

• GlassFish will continue as the Java EE reference implementation & open source project
• Oracle will continue to support GlassFish for an extended period
• Oracle’s strategic app server is Oracle WebLogic
• GlassFish Enterprise Server and WebLogic are expected to share core components
• Oracle plans to license GlassFish Enterprise with WebLogic Server Offerings
• Oracle Web Center is Oracle’s strategic portal offering
• Oracle will continue to support GlassFish Web Space Server and Sun Portal Server, but plans to provide an upgrade path for Sun Portal Server and Web Space Server to Web Center
• All existing customers will be fully supported according to their existing support agreements

N.B. In one of the slides, it seemed that Oracle was positioning GlassFish for development and testing, and WebLogic for production environment.

SOA and integration strategy: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

Here are the key points:

Oracle SOA Suite continues as the strategic product

Sun JCAPS will be supported and maintained

GlassFish ESB continues as an open source project

Oracle will port some of the capabilities of Sun SOA products to SOA Suite

From an MDM/Data Integration perspective, Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, Oracle Site Hub, Oracle Supplier Hub, and Oracle Data Integrator continue as strategic products 

Identity Management: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

In the area of security, there were a lots of changes:

Directory Server

• Sun Director Server EE and Oracle Internet Directory will co-exist as strategic products
• OpenDS will continue as open source project
• Oracle Virtual Directory is the strategic product for directory integration

Access & Identity Management

• Oracle Access Manager is the strategic product for SSO
• OpenSSO continues as an open source project
• Oracle Identity Federation combined with Sun’s Fedlet is the strategic product for federated SSO
• Sun’s Secure Token Service is added to Oracle Access Management Suite
• Oracle Identity Manager is the strategic product
• Oracle plans to enhance OIM with Sun Identity Manager, and plans to provide upgrade path to OIM
• Sun Role Manager is the strategic product for identity governance, and will be renamed to Oracle Identity Analytics

Developer Tools: Ted Farrell (Chief Architect & SVP)

In the area of developer tools, Oracle has two offerings: JDeveloper & Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse.  JDeveloper is Oracle’s primary developer platform across all Oracle solution.  With the acquisition of BEA, Oracle has had to support Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse to support its Java developer community.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle gains additional developer tools.  The main developer tool is NetBeans.  Oracle will continue support and investment in NetBeans as well as NetBeans community to foster innovation (plug-ins, dynamic languages etc).  Sun also has other development tools such as Keani.  Oracle intends to use Kenai internally, and will discontinue its public interface.

StarOffice: Michael Bemmer (Sun VP StarOffice)

Finally, in terms of StarOffice suite, it will be supported and folded under Oracle applications division. Renamed to Oracle Office Product, it will be integrated with other Oracle products (i.e. developer tools, content management, BI…)

---------------------------------

Overall, the webcasts offered a lot of specific details about Oracle’s product plans except for MySQL.  With the Sun acquisition,  besides hardware, Oracle has picked up a lot of complimentary software assets in the area of virtualization, systems management, security, and of course Java.  There still remain some gaps in their offerings (i.e. systems management). It will be interesting to see how quickly they can make all the necessary technology integration and consolidation and transform to a “systems” company.

The enterprise has to deal with a mixed bag of virtualization vendors…

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Oracle Open World and attended a good session on JRockit (JRockit: What’s new & What’s coming).  The presenters were from JRockit lab in Sweden, and they presented many things from  new features, JVM performance, JRockit Mission Control (JRMC), JRockit Real Time (JRRT), and JRockit Virtual Edition (JRVE).   JRVE is a JVM that sits directly on bare metal hypervisor (it eliminates the OS layer, thus offering better performance, and simplification in terms of installation, configuration and maintenance).

Back in the BEA days, they showed a prototype of WLS VE running on JRVE at VMWorld in 2007.   That version was running on VMWare’s ESX.  With this version, it only supports and is certified on Oracle VM… Not a big surprise, if you think about it.  Since Oracle’s acquisition of Virtual Iron, Oracle has been optimizing its stack on its own virtualization infrastructure…

I was talking to a customer the other day to ask them about their Virtualization strategy.  This is large company that has deployed different types of servers and OS for different kinds of workload.  Currently, for Microsoft platform, they are using VMWare (when I asked him about Hyper-V, he said no plans yet).  For Linux, they are standardizing on RHT Enterprise Virtualization (KVM)… Oh, not to forget, on the mainframe, they are using zVM.

It occurred to me there is already a myriad of different virtualization tools and technologies deployed in the enterprise.  With Oracle’s solution strategy, there will be compelling reasons for many to deploy yet another virtualization technology in their environment (i.e. Oracle PaaS).  Furthermore, in addition to virtual machines and appliances deployed within the enterprise, many enterprises that adopt Cloud computing (hybrid clouds) will have to deal with additional virtualization infrastructures (i.e. EC2), their set of provisioning APIs and other management interfaces… 

The good news is that major virtualization vendors already support DTMF standardization efforts (i.e. OVF, VMAN) in their solutions or plan to support it.  There are also new standardization efforts around open APIs (i.e. vCloud) to abstract the virtualization technology, and provide a standard programming model to provision and consume virtual resources as well as support those interoperability use cases in the hybrid Clouds…  On the other side of spectrum, there is a growing number of virtualization vendors with provisioning solutions to facilitate packaging, grouping of related VMs (i.e. vApp)  for multi-tiered applications.

So, I don’t think most enterprises can standardize on a single virtualization vendor.  The trick is to figure out a virtualization management strategy that provides unified visibility and control in terms of asset & configuration management as well as infrastructure operation and governance.  Let me know what you think…

Oracle, Sun’s assets, Gridification of FMW, and Cloud Computing

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun hit a snag in EU earlier this month. According to their statement, the EC is concerned that Oracle (the largest database vendor) + Sun’s MySQL (the largest open-source db) would be an anti-competitive combination in their market.  So, they are going to look at this further and make a ruling by Jan 2010.

This is unfortunate for Sun’s customers and also business partners, since it delays any communication from Oracle on product support, strategy, plans, roadmap, etc.  Customers must wait to get more details on how this acquisition may effect their investments in Sun technologies.   For Sun’s business partners, deals are probably on hold until Oracle is legally able to unveil more information. 

There are a lot of rumors around this acquisition.  This reminds of when Oracle acquired BEA.  Back then, I remember hearing some wild speculations about what Oracle might do with BEA assets.  Fast-forward to Fusion Middleware (FMW)11g, JRocket & WebLogic  (along with Coherence) are now key components of FMW, more specifically, Application Grid, and majority of the BEA assets are incorporated into other layers of FMW (i.e. SOA, BPM).  

So, in terms of Sun acquisition, we are just going to have to wait until EC’s ruling to get more details from Oracle :-[   Now, since my interest is in Cloud Computing, I thought it would be interesting to speculate what Oracle may do with Sun technologies once they close the deal…  Before we being to discuss Sun’s Cloud Computing related assets, let’s take a look where these companies are vis-a-vis Cloud Computing.

Sun has long had a vision for network-based computing dating back to a couple of decades ago.  However, their most recent efforts have involved Network.com where they offered a public Grid over the Internet, followed by Caroline which delivers a Platform-as-a-Service based on OpenSolaris, Sun’s virtualization technologies, and HPC solutions.   At this point, some of Sun’s partners (i.e. webappVM, Vertica) have deployed on Caroline.

As for Oracle, there hasn’t been any major announcements around their own Cloud platform.  So far, their efforts have involved offering a set of AMIs on Amazon + Cloud DB backup, and data encryption (which is really a function of Oracle database itself).  

Here is a high-level overview of related assets:

	Sun	Oracle
Compute Hardware	Sun offers a range of servers powered by its own chip technologies as well as commodity x86/x64 processors.  These solutions have been used at large scale internet service providers such as STRATO	None
Compute Storage	Sun offers a range of high performance and scalable storage solutions	None
Compute Network	Sun offers a range of networking solutions from Ethernet-based solutions, to FC SAN adapters & switches, and high performance computing/low latency solutions (Infiniband)	None
Operating Systems	Solaris – Sun’s legacy operating system.  The last version of this product is Solaris 10 (2005). OpenSolaris – This is the open-source version of Solaris and Sun’s strategic OS.   It is a core technology in Sun Open Cloud.	Oracle offers its own distro of Linux based on Red Hat
Server Virtualization	OS-Level virtualization - Sun has integrated Xen into OpenSolaris operating system and offers different levels of resource virtualization (i.e. Zones, Containers, DSC, Crossbow…) Logical Domains (LDoms) – Sun hardware based virtualization solution	Oracle VM
Storage Virtualization	Sun offers a range of storage virtualization solutions	None
Desktop Virtualization	Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Sun Virtual Box	None
Virtualization Management	xVM Ops Center OpenSolaris offers built-in resource management facilities for virtual & physical environments	Oracle VM + Virtual Iron Oracle VM Manager Oracle Enterprise Manager
High  Performance Computing (HPC)	Sun offers a complete stack for HPC workloads (i.e. Sun Constellation System)	Oracle Database Real Application Clusters (RAC) Automatic Storage Management
Application Support	GlassFish MySQL NetBeans	FMW Oracle DB Suites of Eclipse based and non-Eclipse based tools
Systems Management	N1 Service Provisioning Service (SPS) Sun Management Center	Oracle Enterprise Manager

As far as Cloud Computing, here is what I think Oracle will do:

• Sun hardware – This should be pretty straight forward.  I think Oracle will just continue forward with Sun hardware and existing plans.  From an organizational model, there will probably be a new hardware division including all former Sun server, network, and storage groups.  From a Cloud perspective, Oracle will deliver private Cloud offerings based on Sun hardware and an “Oracle-optimized” software stack.
• Sun virtualization – Although both Oracle & Sun have implemented their hypervisors based on Xen, Sun has integrated virtualization at the OS level (similar to Red Hat) whereas in Oracle’s case, it is bare-metal hypervisor.  I think the product management team will decide to keep both to offer customers choices, but probably standardize on a single virtual management framework.  In addition, this acquisition will enhance Oracle’s virtualization portfolio with network and storage virtualization solutions as well as desktop virtualization.  I think Oracle will invest in all virtualization technology areas including VDI, as they will be considered growth areas.
• OpenSolaris – I think Oracle will create an open-source software division to manage OpenSolaris, Sun Cloud, and other software assets & open-source projects.  I also think they will let the developer community to continue to use tools like Netbeans for the foreseeable future.
• Public Cloud – After this acquisition, Oracle will be able to offer a public Cloud based on OpenSolaris.  Within a short period of time, I expect to see Oracle’s software available on Sun Cloud.  I also expect Oracle to continue to rally the industry around Cloud standardization…
• Systems Management – At some point, after they figure out how to establish a line between open-source and commercial solutions, Oracle will probably port all of Sun systems management solutions to Oracle Enterprise Manager for unified operation and management.