Oracle Corp. unveiled another piece of its plan to take on Amazon Web Services today.

The company is demonstrating at a cloud computing event in New York a new version of its managed database platform that allows customers to host their deployments on dedicated bare-metal servers instead of sharing hardware with other users. As a result, Oracle claims that latency-sensitive applications can now run much faster on its public cloud. An internal benchmark test showed that the new service tier provides up to 50 times better performance than the largest general-purpose database instance available from AWS.

One-upping the cloud giant on processing power is becoming a key focus of Oracle’s competitive strategy. At its flagship OpenWorld conference in September, executive chairman Larry Ellison (pictured) highlighted how his company’s cloud-based database can carry out certain analytic tasks up to 105 times faster than the rivaling Amazon Aurora service. He even showed how Oracle’s offering can beats its own database when the software is deployed on AWS infrastructure.

But that is not say Oracle is focusing all of its efforts in one area. The company provides numerous other services in its public cloud besides database hosting that target many of the workloads customers have historically run in their own data centers.

To increase the incentive for moving applications to its platform, Oracle is rolling out new virtual machine types alongside the bare-metal database tier that come in one-, two-, and four-core configurations. The addition brings extra variety to the company’s compute lineup that should put it in a better position to compete with AWS, which offers dozens of different instance configurations. Other rivals such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also offer a broad selection of virtual machine options in their respective public clouds.

Oracle is rolling out the new compute options with a load balancing service, another much-needed addition, that aims to help companies operate their applications more efficiently. They’re joined by several smaller enhancements including a new at-rest encryption option for the company’s object storage service.

In addition, Oracle revealed plans to expand its platform to three additional locations over the next six months: Reston, Virginia; London and a yet-undisclosed area of Turkey. The company said the new cloud campuses will each consist of three data centers located a few miles apart. The idea is to position them far enough so that a local outage won’t take down all the facilities in a region, but still enable customers to quickly synchronize information between sites for data protection purposes.

Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud – IaaS, PaaS, Security, Mobile and Analytics, talked with SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE about the competitive dynamics in the cloud business at Oracle OpenWorld in September:

Photo by SiliconANGLE