Oracle’s faux IaaS now gets faux on-demand cloud pricing

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Oracle is continuing its faux cloud strategy, adding to its private-cloud infrastructure offering the ability to rent for a monthly fee preconfigured application servers to be deployed in customer data centers. The available application servers — what Oracle calls "engineered systems" — include Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Sparc SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage.

The notion is they provide specialized capacity beyond what you deployed using Oracle’s private cloud systems, which Oracle labels "infrastructure as a service" but is not actually a cloud IaaS offering — it’s the usual Oracle data center gear. Just as Oracle IaaS is not a true cloud offering, neither is Oracle’s new "Iaas On Demand" selection of rental application servers. Unlike with a true cloud on-demand service, your monthly fee — which requires a three-year contract — covers just the hardware, its maintenance, and some degree of usage. You pay extra for the Oracle software licenses and for "peak" usage (no definition or price given). It’s not the standard cloud model, in which the entire service is included with the fee…

Oracle’s "on-demand private cloud" isn’t merely an equipment lease either. It’s an odd hybrid created because Oracle finds itself stuck between the rock and the cloud, reluctant to devalue its hugely lucrative enterprise software products by folding into cloud-service pricing. The rise of cloud computing very much goes against Oracle’s highly profitable way of doing business: enterprise license agreements, maintenance contracts, and all the other trappings of big software…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/oracles-faux-iaas-now-gets-faux-demand-cloud-pricing-210923