Oracle Supercharges Cloud Database With Bare-Metal Servers

Oracle is now offering its Exadata database technology on bare-metal servers available as a cloud service.

The Exadata Database Machine is an appliance that usually lives in the customer’s own data center. It integrates Oracle’s database software, servers, storage, and network connectivity, all meant to make it easier for enterprises to deploy and manage on-premises.

The company initially launched Oracle Exadata Cloud two years ago, allowing its customers to take advantage of Exadata as a cloud service. But over the course of the past year or so, it has upgraded, modernized, and expanded its cloud infrastructure, building a new cloud platform to improve performance and allow it to better compete against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other top cloud providers.

And today Oracle announced that Exadata Cloud is now available on this next-generation cloud infrastructure.

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The offering is targeted at data center operators that have high-performance and high-availability needs and want to migrate their most important database applications and data warehouses to the cloud, or want to develop new high-performance cloud applications, said Kash Iftikhar, VP of product management for Oracle Cloud.

“The Exadata service we’ve launched is literally giving our customers the same experience as those who have Exadata on premise,” he said. “It’s available on the cloud in an extremely seamless fashion. They get the performance, CPUs and storage they want – all of the functions are exactly the same. The only thing they have to do is jump on a console and access it.”

According to Oracle, its cloud infrastructure is compatible with its databases deployed on-premises, which makes it easy for customers with data centers to transition to the cloud or to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy.

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Carl Olofson, IDC’s research VP of data management software, said Oracle has essentially fine-tuned its Exadata Cloud service to perform even better than before. Making it available on bare-metal servers improves the speed of database applications, he said.

The announcement is part of the company’s longer-term strategy to help its customers consolidate their databases on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and migrate their on-premises applications and data to the cloud, Olofson pointed out.

“It reinforces the core Oracle strategy that they are trying to get as many Oracle database customers to the Oracle Cloud as quickly as possible, and this is another step along the path,” he said.

Oracle has seen its cloud business take off in recent years. When it announced its quarterly earnings in late June, the company said revenue for its IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service business grew 40 percent to $397 million year-over-year during the 2017 fourth quarter. It’s overall cloud revenue, which includes software-as-a-service offerings, grew 58 percent to $1.4 billion during the 2017 fiscal year.

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With today’s announcement, Oracle said its IaaS customers can now self-provision multiple bare-metal servers in less than five minutes, with each server supporting more than 4 million input/output operations per second (IOPS). Its cloud infrastructure also provides block storage that linearly scales by 60 IOPS per GB.

Iftikhar said Oracle is targeting three types of customers with its Exadata cloud offering on bare-metal servers: enterprises that are already using Exadata on-premises and want to shut down their data centers and migrate to the cloud, organizations that want a hybrid solution, and new customers who have all their infrastructure in the cloud already and want to transition to Oracle’s cloud service.

“The audience is all three,” he said. “It’s typically enterprise customers or large service providers who have requirements for high-performance databases. We are talking about petabytes of data, and at a minimum, more than 30 to 40TB of data.”

As part of its announcement, Oracle said FICO, which provides fraud, risk management and compliance software to banks worldwide, is implementing the technology. FICO saw a boost in performance when it tested the combination of Oracle Exadata on bare-metal servers that run on Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure, according to Oracle’s press release.