Oracle Corp. today introduced the latest member of its line of premises-based cloud infrastructure with the announcement of Compute Cloud@Customer, a rack-scale offering that’s compatible with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute services.

Oracle said information technology organizations can use the bundled offering to develop, deploy, secure and manage applications and middleware in their data centers using the same software stack as the OCI public cloud. That capability is particularly important for users with data residency, security and privacy needs.

Organizations can use the same OCI services in their data centers and OCI regions, including application programming interfaces and management tools. The fully managed platform is sold on a subscription basis with a minimum four-year commitment.

A different approach

Oracle is take a markedly different approach from other hyperscalers in the way it packages its cloud-compatible on-premises offerings. Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Outposts, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Stack Hub and Google LLC’s Distributed Cloud Edge are single-SKU subsets of those vendors’ public cloud services, packaged for running in customer data centers.

In contrast, Oracle has split its on-premises offerings into multiple packages under the Cloud@Customer banner. Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is the priciest and most comprehensive of those, comprising a 12-rack duplicate of an Oracle cloud region in the customer’s data center at a cost of $6 million annually.

Exadata Cloud@Customer and Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer are appliances that are tuned for running the company’s database management software. The new offering is for users that want to run applications other than databases or to take advantage of Oracle middleware.

“What our Cloud@Customer distributed cloud strategy does is bring our cloud infrastructure to you wherever you need it to be in whatever form factor you need it to be in,” said Jason Schaffer, vice president of product management and solution engineering.

All about choice

Oracle said its intent is to give customers optimal choice and the flexibility to grow their on-premises clouds as needed. “If you only need database services, you only need Exadata; It’s a purpose-built database machine,” said Steve Zivanic,  global vice president of database, analytics and artificial intelligence. “If you want apps and middleware to complement it, you get Compute Cloud@Customer. If you want all Oracle Fusion applications plus OCI services, then you would get an entire region.”

Compute Cloud@Customer is available in a modular rack-mounted configuration starting at 552 CPU cores, 6.7 terabytes of memory and 150 terabytes of storage. That can be scaled to 12 times the number of cores and memory size and 23 times the storage capacity at a monthly cost that Oracle says is a tiny fraction of that of other hyperscalers. The bundle is fully compatible with the OCI public cloud and the pricing is the same.

“Customers can run their cloud applications across any of our platforms,” Schaffer said. “They can develop a cloud application they want to deploy, test it on-premises and deploy it in OCI. They can also deploy in OCI and bring it back to the data center for replication or business continuity.”

For customers that want to connect their computer and database tiers, Oracle provides up to 800 gigabits per second of dedicated bandwidth optimized for its database and multi-node scalability. Data is always encrypted and organizations can control data locality, replication and backups from a single console. The package can also be paid for by the company’s consumption-based Universal Credits.

Image: Oracle