What is a Oracle Private Cloud Appliance?

Cloud architectures and virtualization solutions have become highly sophisticated and complex to implement. They require a skill set that no single administrator has had to master in traditional data centers: system hardware, operating systems, network administration, storage management, applications. Without expertise in every single one of those domains, an administrator cannot take full advantage of the features and benefits of virtualization technology. This often leads to poor implementations with sub-optimal performance and reliability, which impairs the flexibility of a business.

With Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA), Oracle offers a unique full stack of hardware, software, virtualization technology and rapid application deployment through assemblies. All this is packaged in a single modular and extensible product. The minimum configuration consists of a base rack with infrastructure components, a pair of management nodes, and two compute nodes. This configuration can be extended by one compute node at a time. All rack units, whether populated or not, are pre-cabled and pre-configured at the factory in order to facilitate the installation of expansion compute nodes on-site at a later time.

Oracle® Private Cloud ApplianceAdministrator’s Guide for Release 2.0. Source: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E55813_01/E56837/html/admin-intro-productdescription.html .