At Oracle CloudWorld in New York City, Oracle unveiled new enhancements to the Oracle Cloud Platform to help customers move business-critical applications to the cloud.
In a related cloud announcement, Oracle also says it plans to bring three new regions online over the next 6 months.
In terms of its Cloud Platform advancements, the company announced the availability of the Oracle Database Cloud Service on bare metal compute, and new virtual machine (VM) compute, load balancing, and storage capabilities, all on the same IaaS platform.
IT infrastructure has become too complex with too many configurations, piece parts, and monolithic releases, said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd in his keynote at the event.
Cloud is a generational shift, not just in the technology but in the way we think about IT, Hurd noted. The simplicity and universality of the Oracle Cloud also supports data protection because applications are fully secured, fully patched, and fully encrypted, he added.
As he has done in the past at Oracle events, Hurd offered predictions for 2025. Hurd predicted that by 2025, 80% of production apps will run in the cloud, two suite providers will own 80% of the SaaS market, and 100% of Dev/Test will be in the cloud, nearly all enterprise data will be started in clouds, and the number of corporate data centers will drop by 80%.
Within the industry that Oracle competes in, the transition to cloud services from on premises data centers will create "chaos," Hurd acknowledged. “This is all about moving maintenance to somebody else." And, the transition to the cloud is happening rapidly, Hurd said, describing it as an “irresistible" force. “This is not a what-if; this is the way things are going to go. The sooner you get on board with that the better.”
With the newly announced enhancements to the Oracle Cloud Platform, Oracle says it now delivers differentiated database performance at every scale, and deeply integrated IaaS capabilities, to enable customers to develop, test, and deploy their business-critical applications in the cloud.
In a conversation following the CloudWorld keynotes, Sohan DeMel, vice president of product strategy at Oracle, commented on the significance of the Oracle Database Cloud Service on bare metal. “Customers need 100% compatibility with what they are running on premises,” said DeMel. “Customers run on virtual machine infrastructure, on bare metal infrastructure, on Oracle Engineered Systems infrastructure, and, with this announcement of Oracle Database Cloud Services on bare metal, we are giving customers that fully compatible environment also in the cloud so that their applications will behave exactly the same in the cloud as they do on premises without any change. This ensures that customers have that identical environment and 100% compatibility is very important to mitigate business risk. “
According to Oracle, the Database Cloud Service, both on virtualized and high performance bare metal compute servers is suitable for development, testing, and deployment of enterprise workloads, and the recently announced Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service offers a fully managed service for developers, business analysts, and midsized organizations, with performance for mission-critical data warehousing and transactional database workloads.
Adding further improvements to the Oracle Cloud Platform, new IaaS services expand support for web-scale and enterprise applications. Oracle IaaS now offers one, two, and four-core virtual machine (VM) shapes, which run on the same low latency, high performance Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) as our bare metal compute shapes, block volumes, and object storage. In addition, a new Load Balancing Service adds three provisioned bandwidth shapes – 100Mbps, 400Mbps, and 8Gbps – supporting a range of application traffic, high availability, and security needs. Other enhancements include a new block storage shape (2TB) and encryption-at-rest for object storage.
Oracle’s New “Regions” to Increase in Number
The expansion of Oracle’s cloud footprint geographically over the next 6 months will include Reston, Virginia; London, UK; and Turkey. The new regions are expected to come online by mid-2017. With this expansion, Oracle says it will have doubled the regional presence of its cloud platform in the last 24 months, with 29 regions available globally.
Additional regions are planned to come online in APAC, North America, and the Middle East through mid-2018.
Deepak Patel, vice president of product development at Oracle, speaking in follow-up conference call, said that now at Oracle, he is surrounded by close to 1,000 people, 70% of whom have come from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Joyent or other cloud providers. He noted that this staff has doubled twice in size in the last year, and it is expected to double twice in the next year or so, adding “significant engineering horsepower,” and fueling Oracle’s engineering velocity. Oracle is also investing heavily in automation and configuration capabilities to quickly operationalize new regions.
The plan, he noted, is to operationalize a new region around the globe every quarter if not more often, with significant momentum in capital investments as well as partnerships.
For more information, go to http://cloud.oracle.com.