Intel and Oracle Partner to Offer Cloud Computing

Intel Corp and Oracle Corp announced that they're teaming up to offer cloud computing for corporate businesses. The collaboration effort will help to improve efficiency and network security for pushing programs into virtual clouds. A new XEON processor will also be available to provide a 17 percent performance increase.

Intel Corp and Oracle Corp announced they will partner to let business technology customers deploy applications for virtual cloud computing. The announcement was made on Tuesday at the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference.

"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based," Robert Shimp, Oracle's technology business unit group vice president, said in a statement.

The business technology giants have been partners for 15 years. The two will work on network security and flexibility for migration between private and public clouds.

Oracle is itself leveraging virtualization heavily within its own infrastructure, and recently announced its VM Templates suite, which combines Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Manager 10g, Siebel CRM 8 and Enterprise Linux, with all the applications pre-installed and pre-configured.

Intel also announced that the chip maker will go into production in the fourth quarter with the Nehalem chip for desktops and workstations. It will offer a product for database servers which will be available from its hardware partners in the first quarter of 2009. Nehalem was the code name for the processor when it was in development, but the official name is the Core i7.