Cloudwashing: (n) The act of making existing products sound like a cloud offering, even if it’s not.

The hype is high, but cloud computing benefits are real. Know the difference.

In an attempt to further associate itself with all things cloud, Oracle recently announced  a “Cloud File System,” which the company claims will “deliver advanced capabilities for storage clouds.”  We took a closer look at this so-called “Cloud File System” to understand what exactly are these “advanced capabilities for storage clouds.”

What we found is that there’s absolutely no multi-tenancy support, no support for usage-based billing or pricing, no object store and no API interface for customers.  Unfortunately for Oracle, and any customer that buys into this announcement, those are four key features that effectively form the basis for a cloud storage environment.

The whole premise of cloud is pay as you grow. As Wikibon pointed out in a recent blog post, customers want capacity on demand, with variable costs, and only want to pay for what they use. They want their vendors to offer them true cloud. They want on-demand but they’re getting cloudwashed by vendors like Oracle.

Without those four key capabilities—which are the core fundamentals of a true cloud storage environment (secure multi-tenancy and consumption-based pricing are mandatory)—Oracle is simply cloudwashing its existing software.

The Oracle Cloud File System is just a clustered file system that they decided to put the “cloud” stamp on.  Now, pretty much all the major storage array vendors now offer “cloud storage platforms” (that used to be enterprise RAID systems) and even the network switch vendors now have “switches optimized for cloud computing.”  There is absolutely nothing new with this Oracle software package that makes it anymore suited for cloud storage deployments than any other typical, off-the-shelf clustered file system on the market today.

By taking a basic underlying file system and cloudwashing it, Oracle is joining some of the worst offenders in the industry. We would have hoped for more from Uncle Larry and his Attack of the Stack, but perhaps the marketing drones at Oracle didn’t run this one by him.

Vendors need to bring it and quit the cloudwashing.  The market is looking for real solutions not hype.