Rational Survivability

Try not to be
such an Oracle Hater,
Build a big, honkin’ Cloud:
Exalogic &  -data

It’s fluffy & shiny
it’s new & fantastic
It scales like butta,
cos it’s so damned elastic

It may cost you millions,
but it’ll save you a buck.
Is it really a cloud?
Larry don’t give a f*ck.

It’ll castigate partners
and alienate friends
it’s got unbreakable linux
and it also self-mends

The kernel is magic,
OVM’s where it’s at
Some might disagree,
especially RedHat

Infiniband, ten Gig,
many Sun-powered cores
It’s got enough cycles
for HPC chores

The issue some have,
is Larry’s evil plot
It’s really quite simple,
a mortgage and yacht.

It’s like “War of the Roses,”
‘tween Big O, Salesforce
Gets ugly in the  Valley
when partners divorce

Some CEO’s chide Larry,
and others, they scoff.
Some fire back with venom
like Mark Benioff

It’s a False Cloud, a Non-Cloud
“We’re like A-W-S”
this marketing plan
is one freakin’ mess

Just one file to patch it,
it’s IT on demand.
It’s a mainframe with JBoss,
can’t you understand!?

It’ll take all you can give it,
all you can muster,
It scales from one
to an eight headed cluster

At the end of the day,
from morning to nox
take comfort that Cloud
now comes in a box.

—

P.S. You may be interested in other little ditties I have scratched into existence, here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Oracle spins own Linux for mega hardware (go.theregister.com)
• Is Oracle the Leader in Cloud Computing? (dailyfinance.com)
• Oracle Exalogic (pythian.com)
• Oracle Launches ‘Private Cloud’ Box (developers.slashdot.org)
• Exalogic: Larry Gets the Cloud Now & He Wants It All (cloud.gigaom.com)
• Proceed With Caution to Oracle’s Proprietary Linux Kernel (pcworld.com)
• Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel: A Clean Break With Redhat? (cloudave.com)
• Oracle Adopts the Worst Term for Cloud Computing to Describe an Impressive Machine (readwriteweb.com)

We’re told repetitively by Software as a Service (SaaS)* vendors that infrastructure is irrelevant, that CapEx spending is for fools and that Cloud Computing has fundamentally changed the way we will, forever, consume computing resources.

Why is it then that many of the largest SaaS providers on the planet (including firms like Salesforce.com, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) continue to build their software and choose to run it in their own datacenters on their own infrastructure?  In fact, many of them are on a tear involving multi-hundred million dollar (read: infrastructure) private datacenter build-outs.

I mean, SaaS is all about the software and service delivery, right?  IaaS/PaaS is the perfect vehicle for the delivery of scaleable software, right?  So why do you continue to try to convince *us* to move our software to you and yet *you* don’t/won’t/can’t move your software to someone else like AWS?

Hypocricloud: SaaS firms telling us we’re backwards for investing in infrastructure when they don’t eat the dog food they’re dispensing (AKA we’ll build private clouds and operate them, but tell you they’re a bad idea, in order to provide public cloud offerings to you…)

Quid pro quo, agent Starling.

/Hoff

* I originally addressed this to Salesforce.com via Twitter in response to Peter Coffee’s blog here but repurposed the title to apply to SaaS vendors in general.