Oracle Launches Cloud Data Centers in Frankfurt

Three cloud data centers supporting the first availability region of Oracle’s new cloud platform in Europe came online this week.

Each data center hosts what Oracle refers to as an “availability domain,” which is similar to an Amazon Web Services Availability Zone or a Google Cloud Platform Zone. Multiple cloud data centers within a region enable customers to deploy redundant application infrastructure for high availability.

Oracle is also working on launching a cloud region in the UK, expecting to bring it online in February or March of next year, Kash Iftikhar, the company’s VP of IaaS, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. As Britain prepares to separate from the European Union, cloud providers can no longer serve both from a single location, since they’re likely to end up with separate data privacy and data sovereignty regulations.

More Oracle cloud regions are in the works, but the company hasn’t disclosed locations or launch target dates for those. “We have global presence; we are continuing to invest, and based on the right market opportunity and customer demand we will keep on expanding our footprint,” Iftikhar said. “We have an aggressive schedule.”

Enterprise Workloads in Crosshairs

Its latest cloud platform, which has recently been rebranded as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, was designed by some of the same engineers that designed cloud platforms for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The company made an effort specifically to attract some of the top talent in the space to build the infrastructure.

Related:Oracle Brings Blockchain-as-a-Service to Its Cloud

Oracle is using its decades of experience running enterprise workloads to differentiate itself from AWS, the leader in the space, and others, who have placed too much emphasis on cloud-native applications, Iftikhar told us. He sees a major opportunity in helping enterprises that want to refactor their complex existing applications for cloud.

The company’s plan also includes aggressive competition with AWS on price and performance. Its new high-performance bare-metal cloud servers, announced at Oracle OpenWorld this week, are meant for traditionally compute-hungry applications (such as computational fluid dynamics or analytics) but also for companies that want to consolidate typical existing enterprise workloads in the cloud, including their Oracle databases, he said.

Oracle’s Many Clouds

OCI is now hosted in three regions, the other two being in the US – in Arizona and Virginia. But those aren’t the only cloud data centers Oracle operates.

Its much more mature Software-as-a-Service portfolio is hosted in the SaaS group’s own data centers across multiple regions. The Platform-as-a-Service group also has its own data centers, but it is consolidating on OCI, Iftikhar said.

There’s also Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic, the previous version of Oracle’s IaaS cloud, hosted in data centers in North America, Latin America, EMEA, and Australia.

Asia Expansion Likely

Among markets where OCI may expand physical infrastructure to next, Asia is high on the list, and Oracle is likely to launch cloud data centers in multiple markets within Asia.

“Asia’s definitely a big market for us,” Iftikhar said. “You can’t look at Asia as a monolithic … region. It has its own nuances.”

The top markets for cloud data centers in Asia are India, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan.

Listen to our interview with Oracle’s Kash Iftikhar in full on the latest episode of The Data Center Podcast, recorded at Oracle OpenWorld 2017 in San Francisco:

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