To help organizations that are being held back from moving enterprise workloads to a public cloud because of business, legislative, or regulatory requirements that restrict where they store and how they handle data, Oracle has launched a new set of offerings.
Introduced at Oracle CloudWorld in Washington, DC, by Thomas Kurian, president, Oracle, “Oracle Cloud at Customer” enables organizations to get the benefits of Oracle’s cloud services but in their own data center. The approach will deliver a stack that is compatible with the Oracle Cloud but available on-premises. Since the software is the same as the Oracle Cloud, customers can use it for a variety of use cases, including disaster recovery, elastic bursting, dev/test, lift-and-shift workload migration, and use a single API and scripting toolkit for DevOps. Additionally, as a fully managed Oracle offering, customers will get the same experience and benefits using it in their data center as in the public Oracle Cloud.
Explaining the problem it solves for companies that want to move workloads to the cloud, Kurian said that in the past “people have said: I like your cloud services, I like your infrastructure as a service, I like your platform as a service.” But, for a variety of regulatory, legislative, or business reasons, they said their data had to stay within the company’s data center, or within their country’s boundaries. An added wrinkle was presented when these customers sought to use a private cloud, he said. “Prior to this, if you went to any vendor, they had a cloud stack that runs in their cloud and they had an on-premise stack that runs in the customer’s data center. They sometimes called it ‘private cloud’ but the two were not the same thing. They were not the same APIs; they were not the same software.”
With this new set of Oracle Cloud at Customer services, Kurian said, “the exact same software that runs our cloud is now available on customers’ data center floors so Oracle infrastructure as a service and Oracle platform as a service is now available in your data center – same software, same APIs – and because it is the same software and because it is the same APIs, it gives you the ability to get seamless workload portability.”
Software and Hardware
But, even in their data center, said Kurian, with Oracle Cloud at Customer, customers are buying a cloud service, so they get subscription-based pricing, and elastic metered pricing. Using the service on premise, the pricing is exactly the same, he said.
“Obviously, when you run it on your floor it needs a hardware box. It runs our IaaS software, PaaS software and we give you a set of capabilities to manage this environment,” said Kurian. “The hardware box you can buy comes in three different configurations.” There is the Model 288 which stands for 288 Intel X5 cores with 2TB Memory; the Model 576 which stands for 576 Intel X5 cores with 4TB memory; and the Model1080 which stands for 1080 Intel x5 cores with 7.5TB memory to provide a choice of different sizes with local SSD as well as NAS disk, and standard 10GbE Cisco switch within the hardware rack “so to the rest of our data center it just looks like a standard x86 rack.”
Oracle’s goals are to roll out all of the PaaS and IaaS services and it will also add additional styles of hardware. “Exadata Cloud Service will be available; Big Data Cloud Service will be available behind your firewall,” he said.
“What is available now is not just a box running infrastructure as a service, platform as a service,” said Kurian. “It is also fully managed on your data center floor by Oracle Cloud Operations so we are making it really easy for you – the price is the same, it is in your data center, and you don’t have to train people if you don’t want to, to manage this, because our people administer it, so it is truly a cloud service. It is not a box that we are requiring you to buy and then you have to train your admins to manage. Our people administer it just like in the cloud, and you pay for it as a subscription service, or as a metered service. We are going to do the same with Oracle Database Cloud Service Exadata Edition, later this year, and Big Data Cloud Service.
According to Oracle, the Cloud at Customer services include:
- Infrastructure, whichprovides elastic compute, elastic block storage, virtual networking, file storage, messaging, and identity management to enable the portability of Oracle and non-Oracle workloads into the cloud. Additional IaaS services that complete the portfolio include Containers and Elastic Load Balancer will be available soon.
- Data Management, which enables customers to manage data infrastructure in the cloud with the Oracle Database Cloud. The initial set of Database Cloud Service offerings will be followed by Oracle Database as a Service – Exadata for extreme performance and a set of Big Data Cloud services, including Big Data Discovery, Big Data Preparation, Hadoop, and Big Data SQL.
- Application Development to support development and deployment of Java applications in the cloud using Oracle Java Cloud, soon to be followed by other services for polyglot development in Java SE, Node.Js, Ruby, and PHP.
- Enterprise Integration to simplify integration of on-premises applications to cloud applications and cloud application to cloud application integration using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service. Additional capabilities for SOA, API Management, and IoT will be added soon.
- Management to unify the experience of managing workloads seamlessly on-premises and in the Oracle Cloud, which Oracle says, now supports more than 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day, and runs in 19 data centers around the world.
Oracle has recently expanded its cloud portfolio, introducing new Oracle Cloud services which span across all layers of the stack – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. The PaaS and IaaS services can be deployed in the Oracle Cloud or in the customer’s own data center via the Oracle Cloud at Customer offering. The latest additions to the Oracle Cloud Applications portfolio span customer service, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and enterprise performance management, and human capital management; while the latest additions to the Oracle Cloud Platform portfolio are across data management, application development, enterprise integration, data integration, IT operations management, content and process, and business analytics.
“If you look at what we are doing with our cloud, it is a very simple idea,” said Kurian. “Customers want to use Oracle’s infrastructure without having to operate it. They want to use our platform technology – database, middleware, analytics, big data. They want to use a set of applications – ERP, HR, CRM, supply chain. And, so we are delivering a suite of capability – a complete infrastructure on top of which we have built a platform as a service layer, and on top of which we have built software as a service applications.”
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