UPDATED 02:02 EDT / OCTOBER 21 2016

NEWS

Oracle launches bare metal cloud servers to take on Amazon

Oracle Corp. announced the general availability Thursday of its Bare Metal Cloud Service, which was first described by founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison at last month’s OpenWorld conference.

Oracle said the new IaaS product provides a “bare metal” cloud – servers with no Oracle software running on them – in a virtualized network environment that delivers high-performance database as a service, network block storage, object storage and Virtual Private Network connections. The new services connect to existing Oracle Public Cloud services, and they can be provisioned on-demand, by console or application programming interface, with pay-for-what-you-use billing.

The company said Bare Metal Cloud Services is available now in a new U.S.-Southwest region, with additional regions coming soon. The region offers three “fault-independent Availability Domains,” or three physically separate data center facilities that allow customers to build high-availability, cloud-based apps.

At OpenWorld, Ellison talked up the offering as being good enough to finally allow it to take on arch-rival Amazon Web Services. He insisted the offering gives Oracle “a technological advantage over Amazon,” especially in when it comes to “hybrid” computing environments in which enterprises still need their own data centers to work seamlessly alongside the cloud services they use.

Oracle pitched both the performance and the cost benefits of Bare Metal Cloud Services last month, with Ellison saying that the offering will deliver “twice the compute, twice the memory, four times the storage and 10 times more I/O [data transfer speed] at a 20 percent lower price than Amazon Web Services.”

In addition to the price/performance combination, a second key advantage is Oracle’s reliance on virtual networking to provide extreme scalability, something that Gartner Inc. analyst Lydia Leong highlighted in a blog post last month. She described the software-defined network as one of the most important new elements of Oracle’s new platform. “Smart and scalable choices seem to have been made throughout,” she wrote.

Reality check

However, Leong also indicated that Bare Metal Cloud Services was far from being a finished product and that it still has a long way to go before it offers serious competition for Oracle’s rivals. “I would characterize this early offering as minimum viable product; it is the foundation of a future competitive offering, rather than a competitive offering today,” she wrote.

Leong’s prediction that it will take time for Oracle’s offering to catch on was echoed by other analysts last month. For example, Deutsche Bank analyst Karl Keirstead said in a note to clients that while “ORCL talked up its ‘next-gen’ infrastructure as a cheaper rival to AWS … we don’t believe it will be competitive anytime soon.”

Still, that’s not to say the Bare Metal Cloud Services doesn’t have any immediate appeal – it does – but likely only to those companies that are struggling to or don’t want to move their on-premise database and business software completely to the cloud. Still, once Oracle builds out its offering with more services, Oracle’s cloud ambitions could begin to take shape, said one analyst.

“Oracle has monster operating profits that it can pour into R&D and continue to invest to close the gap with roll-your-own cloud options,” said Wikibon cofounder and principal analyst Dave Vellante last month. “Customers will buy the convenience of Oracle’s integrated approach.”


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