Hybrid Cloud

Oracle Hybrid Cloud Offers Location, Choice, and Control

Hybrid cloud and edge computing are transforming and expanding usage of the cloud. Requirements for data sovereignty, security, latency, and field deployability have prevented adoption of public cloud for many mission-critical applications. Oracle Cloud’s hybrid and edge offerings address customer requirements for specialized deployment, disconnected and intermittently-connected operation, low latency and high performance, as well as data locality and security.

All products require tradeoffs, but to date, cloud offerings have been unnecessarily constrained. An approach focusing on large hyperscale cloud regions providing a large number of services required great expense to build, with very limited locations. Smaller scale provided greater flexibility of location, but often required tethering to the public cloud to operate. Customers with the "wrong" mix of needs around data sovereignty, low-latency, broad use cases, or level of control were left on the sidelines.

At Oracle Cloud, we made a different set of choices to serve our customers’ requirements for location flexibility and control, while not sacrificing performance, security, and value. Our portfolio of cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge offerings are helping customers adopt the cloud at their own pace and address hyperlocal data sovereignty rules and stringent IT SLAs. While our commercial and government public cloud regions address many customers and use cases, an increasing array of governments and organizations wanted our advanced cloud services on-premises or in remote locations.

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer

Hyperscale public cloud regions are the standard platform for providing cloud services with the efficiencies of scale. Large public regions are powerful, but they have been, by necessity, limited in number because of their size and expense. These large data centers service an entire global region, in many cases across national boundaries. Applications that require data sovereignty, low-latency communication and processing, and specific security needs may not be well served by traditional hyperscale public cloud regions.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has made technical and business choices that empower our customers to address these requirements.

Oracle Dedicated Region is a fully managed cloud region that brings all of our cloud services into customers’ data centers in a self-contained model. Customers get the exact same architecture, billing models, operations, security, and services as in the public regions of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (including Oracle’s enterprise cloud applications). No other cloud provider even comes close to delivering such a broad set of cloud services in a customer’s data center today.

With OCI Dedicated Region, we get better performance without sacrificing the high level of availability we need.

Tomoshiro Takemoto Senior Corporate Managing Director, Nomura Research Institute

OCI public and government cloud regions

OCI’s architectural choices have allowed us to rapidly grow a network of 29 cloud regions, with 9 more planned, and 6 regions with Azure Interconnect for multicloud workloads. Customers around the world are running their businesses on our public cloud regions with higher performance, savings from globally consistent low pricing, higher disaster protection from multiple distributed regions in many countries, and greater data sovereignty.

When we architected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the tens of thousands of enterprise customers that Oracle serves across the globe made it clear that they wanted public cloud services for their most demanding enterprise workloads in their country or geo-area. Data residence requirements, country-specific compliance requirements, and network latency were some of the key driving forces. To thrill our customers, our strategy has been to launch right-sized regions closer to where our customers want them and scale them dynamically while preserving public cloud characteristics, such as elasticity, high reliability, and operational excellence. To serve the needs of our customers, we had to launch regions much faster than other cloud providers.

Pradeep Vincent Vice President and Architect, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Government Cloud Regions

Oracle’s US government cloud includes two FedRAMP regions for US federal, state, and local government use; three regions dedicated specifically for the US Department of Defense (DoD) and federal customers who have workloads subject to DISA SRG impact level guidance; and National Security Regions especially designed and built for US Defense and Intelligence communities with associated accreditations (DoD Impact Level 6, ICD 503). Oracle also provides a dual-region sovereign cloud for the UK government and public sector.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

VMware is the foundation of the majority of enterprise data centers. To date, enterprises have chosen to either deploy VMware with full control on-premises or to delegate control to an MSP or hosting provider. VMware services in the cloud provided benefits not found in traditional infrastructure environments, including just-in-time provisioning, elastic capacity scaling both up and down, and pay-for-usage models. However, traditional cloud services required relinquishing full control over administration, access, and upgrades.

OCI has delivered a cloud VMware solution that offers these benefits while still giving VMware administrators full control over their environment.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) is the only solution on the market that provides a native VMware-based cloud environment that offers complete control using familiar VMware tools.

VMware workloads to the cloud without having to modify them. They also want to gain scale and agility while maintaining continuity with existing VMware-based tools, processes, and policies. Customers can use Oracle VMware Solution to move or extend on-premises VMware-based workloads to OCI across all regions, including our on-premises Dedicated Regions, without rearchitecting applications or retooling operations.

Entel migrated more than 60 production applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including our mission-critical customer engagement, business intelligence, and risk management systems. We have a strong technical team, including many VMware experts, so a managed VMware service is not helpful. We need administrative access to the VMware software so we can maintain control of every aspect of the VMware environment. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offers my team the exact same VMware experience they had in the data center but with cloud elasticity and access to Oracle Cloud services, providing a fast, easy, and cost-effective path to migrate our VMware-based applications to the cloud. As a result, performance has increased dramatically, and downtime is close to zero.

Helder Branco Chief Technology Officer, Entel

Hybrid Cloud with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer

A common hybrid cloud pattern is a “remotely-tethered” rack or server on the customer’s premises. The "control plane" or service management runs in the public cloud to take advantage of existing services, governance, and operational control, while hardware and data remain on-premises. This model gives tremendous operational advantages, but choices must be made where data, metadata, and backups are located, and how interruption of connectivity affects operations and control.

Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer delivers high-performance Exadata Cloud Service capabilities directly to a customer’s data center. The service helps address requirements for strict data sovereignty and security by retaining data securely on-premises while shifting operational management to an OCI-managed cloud service. Once provisioned, databases remain fully operational even when disconnected from the cloud. Optional Oracle Autonomous Database capabilities eliminate up to 80% of manual database operations. The solution is delivered with an all-inclusive or bring-your-own license subscription model, and the ability to scale up or down seamlessly as needed.

Back in 2010, we adopted the first Exadata platform to improve a display manufacturing system. Now 10 years later, we have implemented nearly 300 Exadata systems for our customers in manufacturing, financial services, construction and engineering and public and private sector services. Aligning with our digital innovation strategy and our journey to enterprise cloud, we have now adopted the first Exadata Cloud@Customer in one of our datacenters and look forward to deploying Autonomous Database.

Dr. WP Hong CEO, Samsung SDS

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure

Edge computing applications reside at or beyond the boundary of a cloud region or network. Self-contained, independent operation with isolated or intermittent connectivity is key to satisfy the requirements of these remote deployments. Physical instances must have enough processing, throughput, and storage to handle intensive workloads in limited timeframes.

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure is a service that extends fundamental Oracle Cloud Infrastructure capabilities to a ruggedized device. This allows applications with requirements for low-latency, time-sensitivity, and high throughput to function even in locations without network connectivity.

The key component of Oracle Roving Edge is the Roving Edge Device (RED)—a high-powered and portable server node. Customers configure a RED in their OCI console with the same services, applications, and data they use in the cloud. OCI then ships the device to the customer. Devices are deployed in the field and can operate either without a network connection or connected to the internet or a local network. After the device usage is complete, the customer returns the RED to an OCI Transfer Station, where data can be synchronized with the cloud and the device is prepared to be used again. Roving Edge Devices can also be deployed in larger clusters for more resilient, longer-lived compute resources or mobile data centers.