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Oracle bins virtual compute appliance, reveals identical private cloud appliance

Same box, but marketers are paid more than you

Oracle has decided that nobody wants to buy a virtualisation appliance, but reckons you're all ready to stampede in the direction of a private cloud appliance. Big Red's marketers have therefore enriched some printers by changing the name of the “Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance” (VCA) to the “Oracle Private Cloud Appliance” (PCA).

There's a difference between the two products beyond the name, but it is largely semantic: the new box is billed as “a simple path from on-premise to Oracle Cloud.” The old one was merely “a powerful Cloud Services delivery platform.”

That “simple path” is, however, an eloquent statement about what Oracle is trying to do here. On-premises server virtualisation is sooo 2011.

These days we're all supposed to be bimodal – happy to hit the cloud when needed but cognizant we also need some on-premises kit chugging along for the stuff that needs to be carefully watched.

In that new context a virtualisation appliance looks kinda fusty. A private cloud appliance with a public cloud on-ramp is rather more modern. An on-ramp to Oracle cloud is a little more controversial: Oracle loves its deep integration between everything and so do some users.

But Big Red touted the virtual compute appliance as a contender for just about any workload. The new appliance's ties to Uncle Larry's Fantastic Elastic cloud makes the general compute sell a little harder.

If you bought the virtualisation appliance, worry not: both products start with the X5-2 base rack and can pack from two to 25 compute nodes powered by Oracle's eighteen-core Xeons running at up to 2.3 GHz.

Networking, storage, installed software also appear to be the same in both products PDF spec sheets here (virtual appliance) and here (private cloud appliance) offer complete detail. ®

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