Oracle's on-prem cloud plan is mostly Engineered Systems

When Larry Ellison promised on-premises cloud kit identical to Oracle's cloud, we wondered just what form those boxes would take. The answer? Pretty much more of the company's Engineered Systems.

Today, said Scott Newman, Oracle's Australia New Zealand's senior director for Platforms and Data Capital Pre-Sales, Oracle's Cloud Machine does everything Oracle's cloud can. But by December 2016 we'll see a new version of the Cloud Machine for platform-as-a-service, plus a big data cloud appliance. Newman said they'll be based on “the modular stuff we use in our own cloud.”

Version two of Cloud Machine will be “blades of servers, blades of storage”. Users will pay for the devices in the same way they pay for cloud – by the server and/or gigabyte and by the hour, no matter if the kit resides in their own bit barns or Oracle's.

The Register asked if the new on-premises cloud kit will use custom Xeons, as for at least the last two years Oracle has used Xeon CPUs with more cores than other server-makers have been able to offer, usually adding two extra cores . Newman was unaware if that's the plan for the new Big Red cloud.

He could tell us that the Cloud Machine, now and in the future, will be a blank page onto which you'll be able to write your own applications and existing licences. The idea here is that by providing an environment onto which customers will be encouraged to port workloads, Oracle will offer baby steps to the cloud. Porting will be the first step and will bring with it cloud-like billing. Over time, Newman reckons, users will take the longer stride all the way into the cloud.

But we have to wait until the new kit's December debut to learn just what's in that cloud, wherever you choose to run it. ®