SaaS: Oracle Virtualization Challenges Multi-Tenancy

Oracle is beginning to go after the On-Demand market. But their approach is different. They are directly challenging the the SaaS leader Salesforce and the Salesforce multi-tenancy approach to SaaS applications. One big reason is security, another is customizability.

Multi-tenancy means all customer data is managed within a single database instance. In general there isn’t a problem with the approach, but a single breach to the system leaves all customer data vulnerable, not just that of a single customer. But a malicious security breach is usually not when the problem happens. The real problem happens when defects in the application software cause problems that inadvertantly expose data from one customer to another customer. Many SaaS vendor software applications, like Salesforce’s, are evolving on nearly a daily basis. Rather than a twelve-month or 18-month release cycle like traditional software, hosted software can be updated easily and frequently. There are a lot of advantages to a frequent update cycle. Frequent updates eliminate the problem associated with big-bang rollouts of new software, but it means that QA testing may not be as rigorous with each update release.

Oracle is instead pushing isolated tenancy, but is adding an element of On-Demand scalability by making use of Grid computing and virtualization. Oracle has announced the beginning of construction of a huge data center in West Jordan, Utah. The center will be one of four “super cells” for Oracle, each cell representing about 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of hardware space.

All the Oracle centers are based on grid computing. The grid is a cluster of loosely coupled commodity x86 server computers networked together to effectively create a supercomputer. Key to the grid is Oracle’s use of virtualization. Instead of standard processor utilization of around 7%, each processor is running at 73%. For on-demand, a single customer will have a ‘template configuration’ that conists of their own virtualized Web Server, middleware and database. The template then gets deployed to the grid and assigned resources as they are needed.

Oracle’s gird is for the most part running with Red Hat Linux, a product supported by Oracle, and BEA middleware, also software recently acquired by Oracle.