Oracle Corp. has a longstanding tradition of naming its products for what they do. Labels such as “Oracle Cloud Free Tier” and “Autonomous Database” provide a fairly clear understanding of what these solutions provide.

Such is the case for the Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M, part of the company’s latest version of its systems for running Oracle Database. The offering brings Oracle’s high-performance Exadata Cloud Service to the customer by placing it inside data centers to satisfy data control and protection needs.

In June, Oracle and Deutsche Bank AG, one of the largest financial services organizations in the world, announced a collaboration to modernize the bank’s technology by migrating the bulk of its database estate to Cloud@Customer. The move provided Deutsche Bank with on-premises support for applications, which either will not move to the public cloud or might at some point in the future.

It’s the kind of optionality that has come to define Oracle’s enterprise strategy. In a hybrid world, the best approach is to bring the cloud to the customer in whatever environment best meets the need.

“They want what all customers want. They want to be able to run their most important workloads on Exadata and high-end systems in a cloud environment,” said Bob Thome (pictured, left), vice president of product management at Oracle. “Exadata Cloud@Customer lets them move to the cloud without losing control of their data and without having to untangle thousands of interconnected databases. It can run not just in their datacenter, but it can also run in public cloud-adjacent sites, giving them a path to moving some work out of the datacenter and ultimately into the public cloud.”

Thome spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. He was joined in the interview Oracle’s Subban Raghunathan (right), VP of product management, and Tim Chien (center), senior director of product management. They discussed the technology behind Oracle’s advances in latency, a defense-in-depth approach to database security, how the company’s converged solution is transforming enterprise IT operations, and plans for continuing to offer a wide range of options in the infrastructure market. (* Disclosure below.)

Fastest platform and lowest latency

Oracle’s announcement of the X9M version of its Exadata platform highlighted a number of technological advances, including significant improvement in the area of latency. Users of X9M can leverage Cloud@Customer to equip on-premises applications with low-latency connectivity to a cloud database service.

“It’s a good follow-on to the Exadata X8M,” said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, in an interview with theCUBE for this story. “It’s the fastest platform on which you can run Oracle database. Their latency is the smallest in the industry; it’s 19 microseconds (19µs). The only way you can get lower latency is to run inside a server and run in-memory, which is severely limited in scale to generally 1.5 TB.”

To put 19 microseconds in perspective, the light from a streetlamp a few blocks away takes about a microsecond to reach our eye. It is essentially instantaneous. How was Oracle able to make such strides in database latency?

“The magic is really grounded in deep engineering, deep physics, and science,” Raghunathan explained. “At the hardware level, between two network interface cards that are resident on the fabric, we cleared paths that enable high-priority, low-latency communication between any two endpoints on that fabric. It’s hardware-to-hardware communication with security built in. There is no software involved; you perform a read, the data comes back in 19 microseconds. Boom, end of story.”

Layered security

In the unveiling of X9M, Oracle described a number of advanced security features that have been built into the database platform. These include database-level Access Control Lists and encryption keys managed at the customer level.

Oracle has taken a layered approach to security, one that begins at the hardware level. The Basic Input/Output System on an Oracle x86 server cannot be modified even with superuser privileges, according to Raghunathan.

“It is defense-in-depth, and that has been our mantra in security for several years now,” he said. “That has to be done through the system management network, so we put gates and protection moats right into the hardware itself. The security of that hardware goes all the way back to the fact that we own the design.”

A key element of Oracle’s database security involves its Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance for the X9M generation. In the age of wide-scale ransomware attacks, database recovery with no data loss and automated validated backups have become a necessary part of enterprise information technology operations.

Oracle’s latest Recovery Appliance version now includes increased storage capacity and synchronization between multiple appliances.

“It’s not just a file-level integrity check on a file system; it’s a database-level validation,” Chien said. “To meet true operational requirements, you have to fully restore the files to production storage. Recovery Appliance was first and foremost designed to accomplish this; it is an operational recovery solution. It’s a huge leap in what customers can get today.”

Full package of options

Oracle’s X9M update comes on the 13-year anniversary of the Exadata platform launch. As Exadata has evolved over the years, Oracle has recognized that enterprises value being able to move data safely and efficiently between system components.

The result is a converged database that offers an ability to manage disparate solutions in an increasingly complex and demanding compute environment.

“Oracle has optimized on latency, IOPS and throughput concurrently, which is almost unheard of in this business,” Staimer said. “Oracle Database is a converged database, which includes OLTP, OLAP (data warehouse), XML (Object), JSON (document), time series, columnar, graphic, spatial, blockchain, AI, machine learning. It is all in a single database, meaning no extract, transform and load is required. You don’t have any of that in the Oracle Database, because it’s all meant to work together.”

Over the past 12 months, Oracle has provided a steady drumbeat of new product announcements. These have included new cloud security tools, support for developers, Arm-based instances, a migration service, fusion marketing, the Autonomous Data Warehouse and significant upgrades for MySQL.

It’s a pace that has sent ripples of disruption through the enterprise IT ecosystem, and Oracle shows no sign of slowing down.

“As far as we are concerned, the goal is forever,” Raghunathan said. “We’re going to continue to go down this path of increasing performance, increasing the security aspect of the infrastructure for the Oracle database.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: Oracle sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE