Ranko Mosic

Big shift towards Cloud environment has started. It is now clear that this change is similar in magnitude to the shift from mainframe to client-server computing two decades ago. Amazon Web Services is the pioneer and market leader in Cloud computing space. Other vendors are playing catch up and do not come close to the breadth and scale of AWS offerings. Services and features Amazon provides are quite extensive and cover many of the enterprise-class computing needs. APIs and command line interfaces are available for each service, which makes scripting and automation achievable. Documentation is publicly available and there is a large ecosystem of organizations and individuals proficient in use of AWS. Amazon is huge, financially stable company - a fact that should additionally calm nerves of anybody contemplating move to the public cloud. Mid and large size corpor... (more)

Oracle Database Backups to the Amazon Cloud

The traditional way of performing backups includes using Oracle RMAN in combination with media management layer software ( typically Netbackup, Tivoli or similar ), which writes backup data to remote robotic tape unit. Tapes are then stored offsite to a secure location. It is well known fact that tape media poses certain challenges in reliability and physical manipulation areas. Cloud-based backups' main attraction is that they are inherently disk based, always accessible, offsite and there are no capex expenditures. All tape related costs are thus eliminated. On the other hand ... (more)

The Oracle Database Cloud Service vs Oracle on Amazon RDS, EC2

The Oracle Database Cloud is Platform as a Service ( PaaS ) so it only makes sense to compare it to Oracle on Amazon RDS.  Oracle on Amazon EC2, on the other hand, is an IaaS ( Infrastructure as a Service ) offering, which gives you full control over the installation, features and actions around your database. Oracle Public Cloud will consist of a number of major services, the Oracle Database Cloud being one of them. Please refer here for a complete list  of services. One of the most interesting characteristics of the Oracle Database Cloud is that there is no need to  purchase d... (more)

AWS Architecture and Major Building Blocks

Amazon Web Services is a global IT infrastructure platform that runs even the most demanding, mission critical corporate applications and databases. Industry heavyweights like Oracle and Microsoft are trying to catch up with the Cloud technologies that AWS started pioneering back in 2002. All major industry players now realize Cloud can’t be ignored anymore. It is obvious that Cloud paradigm shift is as dramatic as the move from mainframe to client-server. Companies of all sizes are hurriedly building private Clouds, using public Clouds, or building hybrid private-public Cloud en... (more)

Oracle Fusion Applications - Installation and First Impressions (Part 1)

Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle Open World 2011. Oracle Fusion Applications is the next generation Oracle ERP that will gradually replace the existing Oracle E Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and other products that Oracle either acquired or developed inhouse. According to Larry Ellison it took Oracle six years to develop and finalize this product. If you look at the Oracle E-Delivery Oracle Fusion Applications download page one of the reasons why it took so long becomes obvious - product comes on 24 DVDs - total si... (more)