Oracle acquires Nimbula, buys way into open clouds
Ellison & Co. to serve up cloud control freak with lashings of open source
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Oracle has announced plans to acquire Nimbula, an purchase that gives the database company a route into the open source OpenStack cloud management system, and a private cloud software stack as well.
The strategic buy was announced on Wednesday morning by a brief statement posted on Nimbula and Oracle's websites.
Nimbula builds cloud management software that lets people spin-up on-premise pools of visualized storage and compute. The company's executive team is led by Chris Pinkham, a key architect of Amazon's cloud computing platform EC2, along with other AWS veterans.
The Nimbula buy gives Oracle another way of controlling enterprises' data centers, and Nimbula's technology "is complementary to Oracle," the companies wrote in a dual statement.
Nimbula's technology "is expected to be integrated with Oracle's cloud offerings," the statement says.
In 2012, Nimbula upgraded its technology to have full API compatibility for OpenStack, the IT industry's open source cloud platform.
Oracle has huge ambitions in the cloud but, so far, little to show for it. Though the big red database giant has announced plans for a huge infrastructure cloud, it is yet to appear.
So far, all we have from Ellison & Co. is a set of software-as-a-service tools and a lot of characteristic bragging.
The transaction should close in the first half of 2013. At the time of writing neither Oracle or Nimbula had responded to requests for comment.
From El Reg's point of view, the acquisition gives Oracle a team that can tell it what's going on in OpenStack – the open source cloud management system that has banded-together top IT vendors in their fight against the margin-destroying AWS cloud.
This is an important in for Oracle, and something of a personality change, as the company tends to dislike collaborating with other companies.
Along with that, it gives Oracle a software package that can plug into a varied data center and make all the hardware dance as one cloud – a neat tool for a company that is trying to sell hardware appliances into diverse infrastructures, at a time when CIOs are having nightmares about how interoperable their systems are going to be with the coming cloud-heavy era. ®
COMMENTS
virtualisation in their licensing
Actually they do. At least on the Solaris SPARC side with zones and LDOMs. They were one of the original vendors to support zones when Sun first came out with them (way before Oracle bought Sun). You can also do it on the mainframe side with LPARs.
To my knowledge they do not support resource capping on VMware, but we have a fair amount of vendors that also do not support it on vmware but do on other platforms.
Re: virtualisation in their licensing
Disinvest? That's simple nonsense. SPARC is getting huge amounts of investment. Try talking to Oracle, instead of parroting propaganda from its competitors.
Close shave
Oracle already bulldozed two technologies I used to use, luckily, for me I didn't pick Nimbula.
Buying in to tech developed by start-ups is like playing Russian Roulette, esp when Oracle is the Borging entity.
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