Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Launches New Services and Capabilities Focused on Giving Customers Even More Flexibility

New fle­xi­ble block sto­rage volu­mes auto­ma­ti­cal­ly tune the per­for­mance cha­rac­te­ristics in respon­se to fluc­tua­ting demand – a first for the industry

Com­pu­te opti­ons for most workloads from a frac­tion­al sin­gle-core VM that can burst to full-core per­for­mance to an enti­re HPC clus­ter with high-speed interconnects 

Glo­bal orga­niza­ti­ons, inclu­ding Voda­fone, Sam­sung Secu­ri­ties, GoTo and Cox Auto­mo­ti­ve use OCI to run all types of workloads with signi­fi­cant­ly bet­ter price-performance 

AUSTIN, Texas, March 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Ora­cle Cloud Infra­struc­tu­re (OCI) is expan­ding with 11 new com­pu­te, net­wor­king, and sto­rage ser­vices and capa­bi­li­ties that enable cus­to­mers to run their workloads fas­ter and more secu­re­ly at lower cos­ts. New offe­rings pro­vi­de cus­to­mers with tru­ly fle­xi­ble core infra­struc­tu­re ser­vices, auto­ma­ti­cal­ly opti­mi­zing resour­ces to match appli­ca­ti­on requi­re­ments and signi­fi­cant­ly redu­ce cos­ts. Lea­ding glo­bal orga­niza­ti­ons inclu­ding Voda­fone, Sam­sung Secu­ri­ties, GoTo and Cox Auto­mo­ti­ve rely on OCI to run all types of workloads, from micro­ser­vices to AI.

Glo­bal cloud adop­ti­on con­ti­nues to expand rapidly as busi­ness models trans­form and the demand for secu­re remo­te tech­no­lo­gy acce­le­ra­tes. Howe­ver, a varie­ty of pre­vai­ling public cloud mis­con­cep­ti­ons are still hol­ding com­pa­nies back from rea­li­zing the full bene­fits of the cloud. For ins­tance, one com­mon­ly held belief is that cus­to­mers have to re-wri­te their appli­ca­ti­ons for the cloud and deal with com­plex pri­cing models to reap the bene­fits of cloud com­pu­ting. Addi­tio­nal­ly, many orga­niza­ti­ons belie­ve that a series of dif­fe­rent tech­no­lo­gy choices have to be made as they sca­le their ope­ra­ti­ons. With today’s announce­ment, OCI is pro­vi­ding cus­to­mers with even more sim­pli­ci­ty and fle­xi­bi­li­ty so that sca­ling can be afforda­ble and easy wit­hout pains­ta­king re-writes.

OCI con­ti­nues to break the rules in the cloud, hel­ping cus­to­mers run their workloads fas­ter, more secu­re­ly, and more eco­no­mic­al­ly,” said Clay Magouyrk, exe­cu­ti­ve vice pre­si­dent, Ora­cle Cloud Infra­struc­tu­re. “Cus­to­mers can build cloud nati­ve apps on OCI with sup­port for open, stan­dards-based Kuber­netes, while AI and high-per­for­mance com­pu­ting cus­to­mers can build some of the fas­test com­pu­ting clus­ters in the cloud.”

OCI Unveils New Inno­va­tions Across Com­pu­te, Net­wor­king and Sto­rage
OCI Com­pu­te gives cus­to­mers the opti­on to deploy on bare metal or vir­tu­al machi­nes. OCI bare metal ins­tances deli­ver high per­for­mance to enter­pri­se appli­ca­ti­ons, which gives cus­to­mers maxi­mum con­trol and iso­la­ti­on. Fle­xi­ble vir­tu­al machi­nes enable cus­to­mers to maxi­mi­ze total cost of owner­ship from their workloads with fea­tures, such as fle­xi­ble memo­ry, sub-core burst­a­ble CPU, and pre­emp­ti­ble ins­tances, enab­ling them to tune and take advan­ta­ge of com­pu­te ela­s­ti­ci­ty so they con­su­me only what they need. The abili­ty to sca­le within a com­pu­te ins­tance, as well as sca­le out by adding more ins­tances, enables cus­to­mers to gain ela­s­ti­ci­ty wit­hout re-wri­ting their appli­ca­ti­ons and redu­ces the risk and cos­ts of migra­ting to the cloud. New ser­vices include:

  • Con­tai­ner Ins­tances: Enables cus­to­mers to use con­tai­ners wit­hout direct­ly mana­ging the hos­ting VM or requi­ring Kuber­netes orchestra­ti­on. OCI takes care of crea­ting the ins­tance with a secu­re OS image, net­wor­king and storage.
  • AMD E4.Dense Com­pu­te Ins­tances: Enables cus­to­mer workloads that bene­fit from atta­ched NVMe dri­ves that pro­vi­de low-laten­cy sto­rage. This includes data­ba­se workloads (e.g., rela­tio­nal data­ba­ses, NoS­QL data­ba­ses), vir­tua­li­zed direct-atta­ched sto­rage, caching, and data warehousing.
  • Ora­cle Cloud VMware Solu­ti­on on AMD: Pro­vi­des cus­to­mers with new AMD-based 32, 64 and 128 core opti­ons, pro­vi­ding them with indus­try-lea­ding VM deploy­ment den­si­ty opti­ons per SDDC host, which cater to high CPU or high memo­ry use cases. OCI deli­vers over 2.5x the memo­ry and CPUs per host than other offerings.

OCI Net­wor­king helps cus­to­mers con­nect secu­re­ly to OCI’s vir­tu­al cloud net­work (VCN) and dyna­mi­cal­ly crea­te iso­la­ted, secu­re envi­ron­ments for their workloads. All neces­sa­ry capa­bi­li­ties, inclu­ding appli­ca­ti­on fire­walls, load balan­cing, and net­work pee­ring have been stream­li­ned to sim­pli­fy pro­vi­sio­ning and manage­ment. In addi­ti­on, fle­xi­ble load balan­cing throug­hout the net­work stack enables cus­to­mers to opti­mi­ze their per­for­mance and cos­ts. As a result, OCI Net­wor­king can hand­le glo­bal sca­le net­wor­king workloads with some of the lowest cos­ts in the mar­ket. New ser­vices and capa­bi­li­ties include:

  • Con­tent Deli­very Net­work (CDN) Inter­con­nect: Estab­lishes direct pee­ring con­nec­tions with sel­ect third-par­ty CDN pro­vi­ders to offer no cost out­bound band­width for OCI Object Sto­rage. Ori­gin-to-CDN cos­ts are a signi­fi­cant por­ti­on of over­all CDN cos­ts and OCI is dra­ma­ti­cal­ly redu­cing tho­se cos­ts for cus­to­mers, even for third-par­ty CDNs. OCI curr­ent­ly offers this capa­bi­li­ty in North Ame­ri­ca for Cloud­fla­re CDN.
  • Con­tent Deli­very Net­work (CDN) Ser­vice: Enables cus­to­mers to deli­ver digi­tal con­tent to end users from a near­by loca­ti­on in a geo­gra­phi­cal­ly dis­tri­bu­ted net­work. Cus­to­mers bene­fit from inte­gra­ted APIs, con­so­le, UCM bil­ling and stron­ger inte­gra­ti­ons bet­ween OCI Object Sto­rage, Com­pu­te and CDN to redu­ce ori­gin-ser­ver-to-CDN egress fees.
  • Fle­xi­ble Web Appli­ca­ti­on Fire­wall (WAF): Enables cus­to­mers to defi­ne a sin­gle WAF poli­cy to pro­tect appli­ca­ti­ons from com­mon exploits (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and enforce the poli­cy on load balan­cer or on the edge.
  • Web Appli­ca­ti­on Acce­le­ra­ti­on (WAA): Sup­ports caching and com­pres­si­on of web HTTP respon­ses in load balancer.
  • Net­work Visua­li­zer: Allows cus­to­mers to per­form a con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on-based con­nec­ti­vi­ty check and visua­li­ze the net­work path(s) along with infor­ma­ti­on about the vir­tu­al net­work enti­ties in the path. This helps cus­to­mers iden­ti­fy and fix com­mon vir­tu­al net­work misconfigurations.
  • vTAP: Enables OCI Net­work packet cap­tu­re and inspec­tion out of band to faci­li­ta­te trou­ble­shoo­ting, secu­ri­ty ana­ly­sis, and data moni­to­ring wit­hout impac­ting performance.

OCI Sto­rage gives cus­to­mers high-per­for­mance and low-cost cloud sto­rage opti­ons through object, file, block, and archi­ve sto­rage. A sin­gle type of block volu­me ser­ves every workload type, from lowest cost to hig­hest per­for­mance, and is recon­fi­gura­ble on-the-fly wit­hout dis­rupt­ing workloads. This results in a fle­xi­ble ser­vice that can ser­ve even the hig­hest SLA enter­pri­se appli­ca­ti­ons at up to 95 per­cent lower cost than other cloud offe­rings. New ser­vices and capa­bi­li­ties include:

  • Fle­xi­ble Block Volu­mes with Per­for­mance-based Auto-tuning: Enables cus­to­mers to chan­ge the per­for­mance cha­rac­te­ristics of block sto­rage volu­mes auto­ma­ti­cal­ly in respon­se to fluc­tua­ting demand. This is a uni­que capa­bi­li­ty in the cloud mar­ket today and helps cus­to­mers meet peak demands auto­ma­ti­cal­ly, and helps redu­ce sto­rage cos­ts when demand is low.
  • High Avai­la­bi­li­ty ZFS: Packa­ges the ZFS file ser­ver in a high­ly available, auto­ma­ted deploy­ment stack that uses OCI Block Volu­mes for the under­ly­ing raw storage.

Cus­to­mer and Ana­lyst Com­men­ta­ry
“We sel­ec­ted OCI to run our video con­fe­ren­cing,” said Sascha Kuem­mel, vice pre­si­dent, Tech­no­lo­gy Stra­tegy, GoTo. “Moving this workload requi­red zero re-wri­ting of appli­ca­ti­ons becau­se of OCI’s Kuber­netes com­pa­ti­bi­li­ty and net­wor­king fea­tures. We saved 50 per­cent on our IT cos­ts through more effi­ci­ent use of resour­ces and lower band­width fees.”

OCI has enab­led us to increase the num­ber of Mon­te Car­lo simu­la­ti­ons we are able to run by 25 per­cent,” said Ian Brun­ton, Appli­ca­ti­on Deve­lo­p­ment Group Lea­der, Ora­cle Red Bull Racing. “By lever­aging a modern tech­no­lo­gy stack, uti­li­sing the power and fle­xi­bi­li­ty of Kuber­netes, we can sca­le up our simu­la­ti­on plat­form whilst kee­ping cos­ts within the tight spen­ding regu­la­ti­ons defi­ned by the sport.”

We’­re run­ning hundreds of bare metal GPUs con­nec­ted in an RDMA clus­ter net­work with a shared file sys­tem to train AI models,” said Jonas Andru­lis, CEO and Foun­der, Aleph Alpha. “OCI’s abili­ty to clus­ter hundreds of bare metal CPUs and GPUs with low laten­cy crea­tes a robust envi­ron­ment that pro­vi­des us with over 140 tera­flops of trai­ning per­for­mance on demand, and at a much lower cost.”

We moved our Ora­cle E‑Business Suite to OCI and cen­tra­li­zed our bil­ling and sett­le­ment acti­vi­ties for our auto auc­tions, inclu­ding Man­heim, the world’s lar­gest who­le­sa­le vehic­le mar­ket­place,” said Maria Riley, vice pre­si­dent, Cor­po­ra­te Sys­tems, Cox Auto­mo­ti­ve. “We saved over $4.5 mil­li­on per year and redu­ced the time it takes to put new code into pro­duc­tion from two-and-a-half weeks to three days.”

The pro­mi­se of the cloud has always been pay­ing for only what you need, but cus­to­mers con­ti­nue to over-pro­vi­si­on due to rigid con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on opti­ons in most cloud plat­forms,” said Dave McCar­thy, rese­arch vice pre­si­dent, Cloud and Edge Infra­struc­tu­re Ser­vices, IDC. “OCI has made signi­fi­cant stri­des to address this pro­blem by intro­du­cing new fle­xi­ble com­pu­te, sto­rage, and net­work infra­struc­tu­re ser­vices over the last year. OCI cus­to­mers can redu­ce cos­ts by more accu­ra­te­ly matching con­sump­ti­on to demand.”

The­se new OCI ser­vices and capa­bi­li­ties are plan­ned for 2022.

About Ora­cle
Ora­cle offers inte­gra­ted sui­tes of appli­ca­ti­ons plus secu­re, auto­no­mous infra­struc­tu­re in the Ora­cle Cloud. For more infor­ma­ti­on about Ora­cle (NYSE: ORCL), plea­se visit us at oracle.com.

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