Oracle brings its full lineup of cloud services to data centers

July 08, 2020

Oracle on Wednesday officially announced the expansion of its Cloud@Customer hybrid cloud offering with the debut of Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. The new, fully-managed service brings all of Oracle’s public cloud services, including its Autonomous Database and SaaS applications, directly to a customer data center.

“Imagine we took all of our Gen 2 public cloud — and I mean all of it — and put it behind your firewall and your data center,” Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said in a virtual presentation on Wednesday. “Nobody [else] gives you a complete public cloud behind your firewall, dedicated to you. This is a first in the cloud industry.”

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Customers pay for the services they use, Oracle says, with a minimum obligation of spending $500,000 a month for three years for the full Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. Alternatively, organizations can pay for just the Oracle Autonomous Database on the Exadata Cloud@Customer service, with a minimum obligation of spending $10,800 a month. The pricing makes the new hybrid offering accessible to both large and mid-sized enterprises, Steve Daheb, SVP, Oracle Cloud, said to ZDNet.

Oracle previously offered Exadata, the fastest Oracle Database platform, delivered as a cloud service in customer data centers via Cloud@Customer. With more than 50 cloud services it can now offer on-premise, Oracle plans to secure a larger share of the cloud market by winning over customers with workloads that — for a variety of reasons — aren’t suitable to run on the public cloud. That includes workloads that require very low latency, must meet data residency requirements, or must remain highly secure.

While other cloud providers offer various kinds of hybrid platforms, the most comparable offering available is Amazon Web Services’ Outposts, which effectively brings a limited piece of AWS into a customer’s data center. AWS just announced that RDS databases, including MySQL and PostgreSQL are now generally available on Outposts. However, Amazon doesn’t promise to keep the data local — currently, all data backup and restore operations are run on the AWS availability zone to which the Outposts system is tethered.

With Oracle Cloud@Customer, “your data never leaves your data center, unless you want it to,” Ellison said Wednesday. “Feel free to back up your Cloud@Customer in an Oracle public region. If the rules are… that data can never leave your data center, you can back up from one Cloud@Customer install to another Cloud@Customer install. We adhere to the strictest data residency and data sovereignty requirements.”

Oracle contends that with Autonomous Database on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, organizations get 98 percent lower SQL latency than they would with RDS on AWS Outposts. Additionally, Oracle says customers can work with up to 7x larger databases, achieve greater database consolidation, and improve performance with up to 12x more SQL IOPS and 10x more SQL throughput.

Bringing Oracle’s Autonomous Database on-premise via Cloud@Customer should be especially appealing to Oracle’s existing database customers, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said during the company’s Q4 conference call last month.

“We think it’s going to be attractive to all of our on-premise customers, large and small, and it will ease their transition from on-premise and into the public cloud during that long period of co-existence when you have your own data centers and you have a public cloud, both operating together,” he said. “We think it’s going to be one of our biggest and hottest new products ever, Autonomous Database Cloud@Customer.

Ellison noted that the company has “hundreds of thousands of database customers, including all the largest companies and governments on the planet Earth.”

Oracle has pitched its Gen2 Cloud as purpose-built for the enterprise, but the company remains a niche infrastructure provider, with a fraction of the market share held by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Ellison has repeatedly asserted that the Autonomous Database is one of the “key product areas that will determine Oracle’s future in the cloud.”

The fully-managed Cloud@Customer offers the same APIs, SLAs, prices, and levels of security that customers would get on Oracle’s public cloud. New features and functions are promised to be available as soon as they’re available on the public cloud. Customer data, including all API operations, remain local to customer data centers, Oracle says.

Customers using the new Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer currently include the Nomura Research Institute (NRI) in Japan, the largest Japanese management consulting and economic research firm, and the Oman Information Technology and Communications Group.

Standing up Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer should take just a few weeks, Oracle says, while deploying Autonomous Database on Cloud@Customer typically takes less than a week.

In addition to announcing the new Cloud@Customer offerings, Oracle on Wednesday announced new autonomous capabilities and services, including the introduction of Autonomous Data Guard. The new service offers autonomously-managed disaster recovery, protecting against database and site failures. It provides near zero data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO) objectives in the even of a catastrophic failure.

“If you’re running your application in one data center and there should be a disaster — a flood, a fire, something like that — your application continues to run because we have a copy of that application ready to run in another data center, probably pretty far away,” Ellison explained Wednesday.