Oracle supports, licenses for Amazon EC2 cloud environments

Oracle today announced that customers can license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in a cloud computing environment.

The first products will be available for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. Customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.

Oracle intends to expand its Cloud offering to other platforms. Support and associated time lines will be based primarily on customer demand, according to Oracle’s website.

Oracle is also offering a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) so that Oracle products can be deployed to the cloud quickly. Using Oracle provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Linux fully configured and ready to use within minutes. Developers can use the provisioning and automated software deployment to build applications using Oracle’s development tools such as Oracle Application Express.

Additionally, Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support and Amazon Premium support is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC.

Oracle is also introducing a secure Cloud-based backup solution called Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module, based on Oracle’s tape backup management software, Oracle Secure Backup, so customers can use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as their database backup destination.