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Oracle reaches for the business computing “cloud”

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison unveiled an Elastic Computing Cloud combination of hardware and software that he said offered ten times the capacity of IBM’s biggest machine at a quarter of the price.

The 1.075 million dollar “cloud in a box” stood slightly taller than Ellison and held 30 servers, an Infiniband network and an integrated data storage device.

“This box is capable of one million http requests per second,” Ellison said. “If we had two of these machines side-by-side we could do Facebook globally, and they are up to 500 million members.”

Ellison harpooned Salesforce.com as being “Way behind the cloud” and argued that true cloud computing for businesses demanded platforms of hardware and software that gave companies flexibility, security, and reliability.

Firms have been turning increasingly to “private clouds,” essentially computer systems that let them maximize the power available in machines by sharing and reallocating resources as needed in-house.

“We believe cloud computing is a platform,” Ellison said. “It must be elastic and it must include hardware and software; not just applications on the Net like Salesforce.com.”

Oracle has created a new cloud services divisions run by a former executive at IBM, an Oracle rival.