This looks like the million dollar question; what we know for sure is that it is a quite recent technology and different people identify the Cloud Architecture by different key features (On-Demand, Broad Network Access, Resource Pooling, Rapid Elasticity, Measured Service). There are two main categories: Private and Public Cloud, which identifies respectively in house and outsourced Cloud installation. Focusing on Oracle Database technology the Private Cloud is a clustered infrastructure hosted on the company’s data center, therefore the IT department is responsible of the installation, maintenance and life cycle of all hardware and software components. In case of Public Cloud the company demands the management of the databases to a third party, which owns the infrastructure used to manage the databases of different customers.

Beyond the different marketing definitions of database cloud computing, Oracle provides a reach set of features to realize this kind of setup. The main component of this architecture is the Grid Infrastructure, which provides the cluster and storage foundation of Oracle Cloud Computing. On top of the Grid Infrastructure we have the RDBMS which enables RAC, RAC One Node and stand-alone database setups.

At this point, anyone can say that with the exception of the name, there is almost nothing new compared to the earlier version of Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC).  But Oracle Cloud Computing is much more than a simple multi-node RAC which hosts several databases; the introduction of features like Quality of Service Management, Server Pool, Instance Caging (extension of Resource Manager) and the enhancement of the existing ones, allow to consolidate all the environments guaranteeing to each application: the performance expected, the scalability for future needs, the availability to respect the Service Level Agreement (SLA), the best time to market, the governance of the entire platform and last but not least cost saving.

Obviously Oracle provides all the instruments to reach such great result, but it is up to the single organization to define and implement the most appropriate modus operandi in terms of OM, Life Cycle, Capacity planning and management, to obtain the result promised by this great technology.