Nathan Biggs (@nathanbiggs), CEO

In 2006, House of Brick pioneered the use of virtualization technology for enterprise-class Oracle applications when we helped one of the largest restaurant chains in the U.S. deploy their Oracle E-Business Suite on VMware. That helped House of Brick earn the moniker granted to us by VMware employees as their “Premier Pioneer Partner” for all things related to Oracle on VMware. We have established similar credibility in virtualizing SQL Server.

Now, virtualizing Oracle and SQL Server-based applications has become mainstream, and standard practice for most organizations. While continuing to maintain our leadership position in this space, it is now time for us to look forward to the cloud. We are excited that House of Brick is again establishing a leadership position for our customers wanting to consider a public cloud extension to their on-premises virtualization strategy.

House of Brick has been actively working with our partners at AWS and VMware to develop important tools for our customers to plan and design their cloud strategies. Starting today, these tools will be released over the coming weeks and months.

We know that one of the biggest questions that enterprise-customers have about the cloud is related to high availability and the use of Oracle RAC. House of Brick and AWS established a stretched Oracle RAC cluster from our own data center to a VMware Cloud on AWS Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). The results of that effort, and our findings and recommendations were published in a white paper available for registration and immediate download today. A key finding in this effort, which will be discussed further in subsequent blog posts from House of Brick, is that Oracle excludes RAC from their Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment policy document. This prevents customers from deploying RAC in AWS EC2 and RDS without an unlimited license agreement from Oracle that includes RAC.

The next tool that we will release is a paper that we are currently working on with VMware. It will explore the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running Oracle in the VMware Cloud on AWS as compared to the Oracle Cloud. Oracle boasts that its own cloud is half as expensive as other more popular public clouds, but that is highly dependent on the design of the application cloud deployment, with particular emphasis on the design of how Oracle licenses are applied. We are excited to be able to show customers options for reducing their TCO for running Oracle in the VMware Cloud on AWS, all while maintaining the amazing benefits that VMware provides over anything the Oracle Cloud can offer.

With funding and support from AWS and VMware, House of Brick has started to provide on-site customer proofs-of-concept for running Oracle and SQL Server workloads in the VMware Cloud on AWS. This program is available broadly and if you would like to consider such a project, please contact your House of Brick sales director to discuss how this could work for your organization.

House of Brick will also be speaking at some important conferences this fall. We will have several breakout sessions at VMworld US, and VMworld Europe, and we are anticipating speaking at AWS re:Invent as well. We will provide updates and insights from our customer experiences at these events.

We hope that you will take advantage of the immediate availability of the RAC on VMware Cloud on AWS white paper. We will continue to announce more tools and content as they are released. Please subscribe to our monthly newsletter to keep up with these announcements.