Not long ago Larry Ellison was the guy who couldn’t stand the taste of the word cloud in his mouth. Well, now he’s got one of his own. Well, to be precise, he’s got a rack-mounted pre-packaged integrated middleware machine – and if you’ve never heard of such a thing it’s because it’s supposed to be the only one around. Larry calls it “one big honking cloud.”

Oracle officially calls it its Exalogic Elastic Cloud and it’s supposed to provide enterprise accounts with a complete cloud application infrastructure.

That means up to 30 64-bit Intel six-core x86 servers working as a virtual pool complements of some Coherence software for distributed Java caching, a 40-Gbps InfiniBand-based I/O fabric, 1TB solid-state storage, 40TB of SAN storage, 3TB of memory, VM, Oracle’s (née BEA) WebLogic Server, assorted Java middleware like JRockit and HotSpot and either Solaris or Oracle Linux.

It’s supposed to put rockets on Java and non-Java applications.

Oracle claims 12x improvement for Internet apps to over a million HTTP requests a second and 4.5x improvement for Java messaging applications to over 1.8 million messages a second.

It’s supposed to be 10 times better than a standard app server configuration and support an enterprise-class multi-tenant cloud trafficking in large-scale, mission-critical deployments like, oh, say, Facebook. It’s supposed to be good for processing a million HTTP requests a second. Figure Facebook would need two Exalogic racks.

Oracle’s cloud-in-a-box is supposed to support thousands of applications with differing security, reliability, and performance requirements, which Oracle says makes it an ideal platform for enterprise-wide data center consolidation.

It says its parallel I/O fabric technology enables a high level of fault tolerance with near-instant failover and 100% isolation of applications so enterprises can consolidate numerous mission-critical applications on a single system with low risk.

All this is terribly different from the Salesforce.com multi-tenant platform, Larry said, which is just one or two SaaS applications on the Internet and where customer data is – yuck – commingled on a platform that isn’t fault tolerant or secure and more like EC2 with its virtualization and elasticity. It is also unlike what IBM has on offer, which “still have a number of places where you have a single point of failure.”

Oracle sees it as a Java application consolidation platform capable of serving the workloads of the entire enterprise from small departmental applications to mission-critical enterprise resource planning infrastructures to re-hosted mainframe applications.

The widgetry accelerates the performance of Oracle’s entire Fusion Middleware portfolio and increases the performance of applications running on WebLogic. It’s optimized for integration with Oracle Database 11g, Real Application Clusters and the Exadata Database Machine that inspired it. It’ll run any Oracle application without modification.

A rack goes for $1,075,000; the widgetry can scale to eight racks total.