Oracle is now offering its Exadata Cloud service on bare-metal servers it provides through its data centers. Bare metal means dedicated hardware which should increase the performance. The company launched Exadata Cloud two years ago to offer its database services as a cloud service. It now competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in this segment.
Oracle has integrated database software, servers, storage, and network connectivity on the custom hardware it inherited from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 and Exadata Database Machine was born. This is now available in the cloud version by Oracle which provides customers a database appliance in the cloud instead of running the database in a virtual machine.
The customers can now allocate all the CPUs and storage they want. Since Exadata Cloud service is compatible with its databases deployed on-premises, the transition to the cloud or to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy is smooth for the customers. Oracle claims that each server supports more than 4 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) hence provisioning multiple bare-metal servers can be done with lightning speed. Its cloud infrastructure also provides block storage that linearly scales by 60 IOPS per GB.
“With the power of Oracle Exadata, customers using our infrastructure are able to bring applications to the cloud never previously possible, without the cost of re-architecture, and achieve incredible performance throughout the stack. From front-end application servers to database and storage, we are optimizing our customers’ most critical applications,” said Kash Iftikhar, vice president of product management for Oracle Cloud, in a statement.
Oracle now provides the option for splitting the load between on-premises and the cloud to customers already using Exadata on-premises as well as organizations needing such a service. Although Oracle is aggressively pushing for Software as a Service (SaaS) model and providing cloud services but its success depends on the extent to which companies would want to have their data on the cloud along with their own data centres.