InternetNews Realtime IT News Intel, Oracle Head For ‘The Cloud’

SAN FRANCISCO — Intel and Oracle, which have partnered for 15 years, are heading for the cloud, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Tuesday.

“Today Intel and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) are announcing that they’re taking the enterprise aspect of cloud computing and driving it outwards,” Otellini said. The two will work on security and flexibility for migration between private and public clouds, and on industry standards for this migration.

Earlier in the week at OpenWorld, Oracle announced that it has partnered with Amazon to let customers deploy and back up its applications in the cloud.

Otellini also unveiled some of Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) other plans, bringing other Intel executives on stage to elaborate. These include a new toolset to help C developers learn about parallel programming, and details of when products based on forthcoming Nehalem chip will ship.

By tackling the migration between private and public clouds, Intel and Oracle are going head to head with VMware, whose vCloud initiative, announced last week at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, will do the same thing. Oracle has its own hypervisor, (define) based on the Xen open source hypervisor.

Enterprises can now license Oracle’s Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager over Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It also introduced a secure backup module for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Oracle is itself leveraging virtualization heavily within its own infrastructure, and recently announced its VM Templates suite, which combines Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Manager 10g, Siebel CRM 8 and Enterprise Linux, with all the applications preinstalled and preconfigured.

To elaborate on his announcement about working with Oracle, Otellini brought out Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel’s software solutions group. “Most of our datacenter customers are already using virtualization in their infrastructure behind the firewall; we want to help them take it out into the public cloud,” James said.