Photo Credit: Stephen Faig
Data security was top of mind for Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison when he took the stage to announce Cloud Computing – Generation 2 in his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 in San Francisco. Purpose-built for the enterprise and more technologically advanced and secure than any cloud on the market, Ellison said, the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud is built to run the Oracle Autonomous Database.
While first-generation clouds were built on decade-old technology, Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud is built specifically to help enterprises run demanding workloads securely, according to Ellison.
Force Fields and Autonomous Robots
Frequently referring to Star Wars-like defenses, with “impenetrable barriers, or force fields, and autonomous robots,” Ellison said that current state of the art of cloud defenses had been defeated with headlines frequently announcing data breaches at top tech companies and security-conscious government agencies.
They “are just not good enough – not even close," said Ellison. "The smartest technology companies are routinely penetrated.”
As a result of this, he said, Oracle has gone through a period of re-architecting the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. According to Ellison, Oracle’s Gen 2 required a fundamental re-architecture of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with new hardware and new software to provide the ability to identify and “kill” threats. Key aspects of the new architecture include a dedicated network of cloud control computers protecting the perimeter and customer zones, and no customer access to cloud control computers and memory. “We had to add a new network of dedicated independent computers to basically surround the perimeter of our cloud.”
This “not only protects the perimeter of our cloud to keep threats from coming, these barriers also surround each individual customer zone in our cloud so threats cannot spread from one customer area to another,” said Ellison. “That required a completely new hardware configuration as well as new software.”
The architecture leverages AI/ML robots to find and block threats, as well as the ability of the Oracle Autonomous Database to self-administer patches while running. The Autonomous Database uses robots, and said Ellison, “and now we have added lots more robots to protect every aspect of the cloud."
Three Key Advantages to Oracle Gen 2 Cloud Infratructure
There are three primary advantages to Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud, said Ellison:
- The new cloud architecture has security built in from core to edge
- It is easy to move enterprise workloads to the cloud, protecting customer investment
- And it offers “superior economics” with automation and price/performance
“Our goal has always been that as we move from one generation of computing to the next—from mainframes to mini computers to client/server, PC networks, internet architecture, to the cloud—through every generation, we want to protect your investment in data, in applications, in all that code, and make it easy for you to lift that stuff up and move to the next generation and take full advantage of the next generation,” said Ellison.
In addition to security, the Gen 2 Cloud adds much more automation to save labor costs, eliminate labor through automation, and the overall price/performance is “much better” than what you get on premise, with all the latest tools, said Ellison. “Because we don’t over subscribe our infrastructure, we give you an SLA to guarantee your performance.”
The new Generation 2 Cloud provides one secure platform with a unified architecture for the Autonomous Database, an extensible platform for SaaS apps, and runs enterprise apps and cloud native apps. The Gen 2 Public Cloud is available now and the Gen 2 Cloud at Customer will be available in summer 2019.
More Options for DBAs
While continuing to emphasize the advantages of the Oracle Autonomous Database, Ellison also stressed that the role of DBA is not going away. “If we eliminate human labor we eliminate human error,” said Ellison, noting “This is a huge improvement in the reliability of your systems and much lower cost in terms of maintaining those systems.”
But moving to the Autonomous Database does that mean that DBAs are going to be out of work—"not hardly," Ellison said. “There is an incredible shortage of skilled IT professionals on the planet Earth and it is good if we take away some of the mundane drudgery of running a database so they can use their talents to bring up new systems, and do a better job on data analytics rather than making sure that the database is backed up once every day, and scheduling those backups, and having to physically recover the database if it ever goes down. All that stuff is automated.”
Ellison also highlighted deployment options that extend Oracle’s autonomous database capabilities, including dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud at Customer. Customers can choose to deploy their Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated Exadata cloud infrastructure for workload isolation to enable even greater security and reliability for mission-critical workloads. Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud at Customer is targeted at customers who choose not to move to a public cloud because of regulatory requirements but want the Oracle Autonomous Database in their own data center.
Oracle OpenWorld 2018 keynotes are being made available on demand at www.oracle.com/openworld/on-demand.html.