Oracle is expanding its Cloud at Customer portfolio with the availability of the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine. This means organizations will now be able to deploy Oracle Exadata as a cloud service inside their own data center, in addition to the Oracle Cloud and in a traditional on-premises environment.
Oracle’s plans also call for the introduction of the Big Data Cloud Machine as part of the Cloud at Customer program, and in the future, there may also be other cloud machine variants available within the program, said Tim Shetler, vice president of product management at Oracle.
“Roughly 80% of IT applications and databases are still running in organizations’ own data centers and not in somebody else’s,” said Shetler, “so we are catering to that reality.”
The Cloud at Customer program is designed to address the fact that some organizations have been constrained from moving enterprise workloads to the public cloud by business, legislative, and regulatory requirements.
For companies in certain industries and public sector organizations, it is not legally permissible to move databases out of their own data center and into another organization’s data center, and some countries also have prohibitions against moving data out of their country, Shetler observed. In addition, organizations may have critical applications that have been built up over the course of many years. These applications often have mainframe components, security platforms, and other “entanglements,” making it impractical to from other platforms from a performance perspective, he added.
The Oracle Cloud at Customer program gives organizations the benefits of the public cloud business model - including subscription pricing and public cloud subscription and Oracle’s monitoring and managing the infrastructure - without the risk or the movement of data, he noted.
Introduced in 2008, Exadata has been a successful program for running Oracle Database, said Shetler. “A little over a year ago we introduced the Exadata Cloud Service, which is the ability to run Exadata in our public cloud. The Cloud at Customer Program has now been extended by taking that same Exadata Cloud Service and putting it into the Cloud at Customer with the Exadata Cloud Machine.”
According to Shetler, when customers deploy Exadata as a cloud service inside their own data center it is the “exact same” software and hardware technology as in the Exadata Cloud Machine that a customer would run on-premise or in the public cloud, which enables customers to transparently move applications and databases back and forth.
In addition, he noted, “One of the things that we did with both the Exadata Cloud Service in our public cloud and the Exadata Cloud Machine is bundle the whole portfolio of Oracle Database software,” such as Real Application Clusters, Database In-Memory, Active Data Guard, and Advanced Security. The availability of these software components supports customers in building new applications, but also ensures that any existing application will run in the cloud without change “because every possible feature in the Oracle Database is prepackaged” into the cloud platforms, Shetler said.
According to Shetler, the ability to run Oracle Exadata as a cloud service inside their own data center is expected to be particularly well-received by Exadata’s existing customers who are already running applications and databases on premises using Exadata today. Instead of expanding on premises, they can go with the cloud model which gives them more flexibility.
For more information, go to http://cloud.oracle.com.