Oracle Corp. today announced a new service that’s designed to help customers run their most challenging transaction processing and data analytics projects in the cloud, without making any changes to those apps.

It’s an important development, Oracle says, because many of its customers have been reluctant to offload their most important workloads to the cloud on concerns over performance, availability, a lack of features and consistency, and the ability to scale up over time.

“With today’s announcement, Oracle enables customers to run any business-critical database workload, including the largest and most compute and memory-intensive workloads with dramatically faster performance, higher scalability and elasticity, and lower costs than any other cloud provider,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies at Oracle. “Oracle’s new database cloud service is based on the proven, eighth-generation Exadata X8M platform, optimized for Oracle Database, and already in use by 86% of the Fortune Global 100 to run their most demanding workloads.”

The Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure makes it possible for companies to migrate extremely demanding databases and other workloads to the company’s cloud platform with ease, according to the company. The service takes advantage of Intel Corp.’s Optane persistent memory that completely bypasses the operating system and network software stacks to enable 2.5-times faster transaction processing operations and 10-times better latency, Oracle said.

Always keen to point out its superiority to its rival Amazon Web Services Inc., Oracle said the new service can provide database input/output operations up to 50 times faster than the AWS Relational Database Service.

Exadata Cloud Service X8M is based on Oracle Real Application Clusters, which enable greater scale and high availability for all types of database workloads. Oracle said databases deployed on the service can scale to up to 4,600 central processing unit cores, 44 terabytes of dynamic random access memory, 96 TB persistent memory, 1.6 petabytes of flash and 25 PB of database capacity.

That enables it to best Amazon RDS’ CPU scaling performance by 25 times and its storage performance by 20 times, Oracle boasted. Moreover, disaster recovery is assured by Oracle’s Data Guard database replica service, which offloads SQL reads and writes to provide protection across multiple cloud regions.

Wikibon Chief Technology Officer David Floyer backed the company’s claims regarding Exadata Cloud Service X8M’s performance. “Wikibon assesses this service to be the highest-performance cloud database service available,” the analyst said.

Floyer explained how Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is relevant, because online transaction processing systems of record are becoming more complex, while analytic systems are growing bigger and need answers faster than ever before.

“Data-driven businesses are combining both in real-time, and so the cloud database technical requirements to meet these challenges include the ability to combine row and column access, integrate SQL and NoSQL databases, and support ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth I/O,” Floyer said. “The Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M has been upgraded to provide best-in-class I/O latency, a hefty data warehouse, together with excellent vertical and horizontal scaling.”

Photo: May Wong/Flickr