Oracle reveals secret recipe for free DIY storage cloud

World+dog may be busy preparing Dropbox clones, but Oracle seems to think a better idea is to build your own domestic cloud storage rig and has therefore published a recipe for doing so.

Naturally the recipe includes lots of Oracle products – VirtualBox, Solaris 11.1 and ZFS are all required - but non-Oracle open source kit also gets an airing, namely Apache and the free AjaXplorer tool.

The latter makes it possible to connect iPhones and Android devices to the server, which gives oracle the ammunition it needs to offer the recipe as a home-brewed DropBox alternative. The South Korean author of the recipe, Suk Kim, recommends runs in a virtual machine with 2GB of RAM and at least 20GB of disk space.

The recipe shows data being shared over a LAN and suggests it as a toy. But this hack can see few reasons a bare metal installation would not allow the recipe to scale nicely. Allied to some dynamic DNS twiddling it might also serve to serve data beyond the LAN. Both scenarios could irritate a competitor or two.

Oracle's also released some more mainstream products of late, including version 5.0 of its Secure Global Desktop, which for the first time runs on iPads. PeopleSoft 9.2 has also emerged, albeit quietly, with free text search across the suite the headline new feature. ®