Oracle has acquired a virtualization startup named Ravello Systems in a bid to strengthen its public IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and differentiate against the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. While Oracle didn't disclose terms of the deal, a source told VentureBeat it is worth some $500 million.
That's a far cry from some of the mega-deals Oracle has done, but not an insigificant sum for a four-year old startup that offers "nested" virtualization technology. Ravello's CEO Rami Tamir provided some details in a blog post:
Upon closing of the transaction, our team will join the Oracle Public Cloud (OPC) organization and our products will become part of Oracle Cloud.
Thank you for your continued support. I want to emphasize that our top priority is ensuring an uninterrupted service and seamless experience for you and all of our customers and partners. Rest assured, Ravello’s service will continue “as is.” In the coming months, we will be working to continue enhancing our value to you and we are looking forward to developing new products and services enabled by this combination.
Ravello will join in Oracle’s IaaS mission to allow customers to run any type of workload in the cloud, accelerating Oracle’s ability to help customers quickly and simply move complex applications to the cloud without costly and time-consuming application rewrites.
Analysis: Oracle Takes A Leap Forward with Ravello Buy
Ravello has developed a SaaS (software as a service) distributed hypervisor called HVX, which allows customers to move VMWare/KVM application workloads to public clouds without any required changes. Here's the breakdown from Ravello's website:
An integral part of HVX is a high performance nested hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) capable of running unmodified guests on top of already virtualized hardware. Conventional hypervisors such as VMware ESX™, KVM and Xen are designed to run on physical x86 hardware and use virtualization extensions offered by modern CPUs (Intel VT and AMD SVM) to virtualize the Intel architecture. HVX, on the other hand is a nested hypervisor that runs inside a virtual machine, where these hardware extensions are not normally available. Instead, HVX employs a technology called Binary Translation to implement high-performance virtualization that does not require these virtualization extensions.
HVX also includes a software-defined networking layer and storage overlay.
The acquisition makes sense, as nested hypervisor capabilities were a key future capability that Oracle revealed it is working on at its recent Cloud Summit, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. [Check Mueller's full event report here.]
"We live in phase two of the cloud—where all vendors are looking for workload—and allowing hypervisor portability is a key strategy," Mueller adds.
IBM and VMware made an announcement this week that also speaks to the drive for cloud workloads. Read our coverage of it here.
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