Catching-up was the main theme in the public cloud last week, at least among the traditional vendors that generated most of the headlines, who moved several steps close toward matching the smaller and nimbler competition. Oracle led the charge with the announcement of support for an emerging component of OpenStack that promises to make the software-as-a-service model more accessible.

Murano, as the technology is called, provides a catalog of applications from vendors in the upstream ecosystem that have been pre-configured to run on the cloud platform. Oracle’s move to jump on the bandwagon will see its widely-used relational database added to that selection.

The company hopes that lowering the entry barrier for OpenStack adopters will level the playing field against rivals that have already embraced the cloud, which is the same goal CommVault Systems, Inc. is going for with the new services it debuted against the backdrop of the news. But the data protection giant is focusing on the traditional enterprise rather than hyper-modern organizations building their environments out of open-source code.

The star of the launch is a new recovery option that allows administrators to back up their infrastructure off-premise regardless of the hypervisor they’re using. It’s complemented by replication and gateway tools meant to help reduce the amount of work needed to take advantage of that functionality. The services are aimed at making it easier for customers to exploit the economies of the cloud, an objective CommVault shares not only with Oracle but also the new-generation vendors threating to disrupt its business.

The means by which they plan to accomplish that goal differs greatly, however. Nuage Networks Inc., for example, has been working on helping organizations replicate the operational efficiencies boasted by the major providers in their own in-house environments, a goal that moved closer last week with the launch of its network analytics console. The technology promises to help administrators quickly correlate traffic and other high-level activity handled by its software-defined overlay with changes in the underlying infrastructure for faster problem resolution.
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