Oracle and Intel® Collaborate to Accelerate Enterprise-Ready Cloud Computing

Companies to Work on Technology and Standards to Make Clouds More Efficient and Secure.

ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO. - Oracle and Intel Corporation today announced that they are collaborating to help accelerate enterprise readiness of cloud computing and make it more efficient and secure. The companies will also identify and drive standards to enable flexible deployment across private and public clouds.

Cloud computing is an efficient way to run programs and store data which a large number of users can access through Internet technologies. Enterprise customers are already running applications on shared infrastructure within their firewalls using Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) and Oracle Grid Computing technologies, including Oracle® Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Application Grid, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle VM. With this foundation, enterprises are now looking to create private clouds for their internal applications and to have the ability to extend them to public, multi-tenant clouds with the same level of security, flexibility and efficiency.

“Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based,” said Robert Shimp, group vice president, Oracle Global Technology Business Unit. “Intel and Oracle are collaborating to make this happen.”

“Intel and Oracle are taking a leadership role to expand the reach of enterprise-ready cloud computing,” said Doug Fisher, vice president, Software and Solutions Group (SSG), and general manager of SSG’s Systems Software Division at Intel Corporation. “By collaborating to improve efficiency, extend standards and enhance security, we’re making cloud computing more of an option for enterprise deployments.”

Oracle and Intel will cooperate in three broad areas:

* Efficiency – Recent collaboration between Oracle and Intel on Oracle VM and the Xen open source hypervisor with Intel VT has yielded a 17 percent performance improvement of Oracle Database running virtualized on Intel Xeon® processors. As Intel introduces new server platforms, and further enhances virtualization technology, Oracle and Intel will continue their joint software optimization work to achieve performance and power efficiency gains.

* Security – Enterprises running software in public clouds must have assurances that the environment is secure, private data can be accessed only by authorized applications, and activities are tracked for auditing and compliance reporting. Oracle and Intel will work together to further strengthen the security of virtual machines in a shared cloud environment to help ensure customer data is protected. As Intel develops new virtualization security features to ensure trusted environments for cloud computing, Intel and Oracle will optimize this technology on Oracle software. Both companies will continue to better integrate their data encryption technologies to help ensure data privacy and security in shared public cloud environments.

* Standards – Intel and Oracle will work with other industry leaders to extend standards that enable portability of virtual machine images, such as the Open Virtual Format (OVF), and to create Web services standards for provisioning and management of cloud-based services.