For more than three decades, Oracle was all about all-Oracle, all the time. There were myriad restrictions: Oracle required you to buy their hardware in order to run Oracle software; only Oracle’s middleware worked with its apps; you needed certain kinds of support that only Oracle offered—unless you took a calculated gamble and went off the reservation to use Rimini Street or Quest Software—and so on.
As Microsoft, Cisco Systems, SAP and EMC have moved away from their proprietary ways in the last few years and seen the benefits of the open-hands approach, so has the giant database and cloud services provider. Oracle and the others haven’t gone totally to the other side yet, and for some use cases they never will, but the ships are changing their courses.
Because all these companies have been forced to move many of their products and services to the cloud, open standards and agile, iterative development have become mandatory. If the cloud hadn’t come into play in the last 11 or so years, the situation might not have pivoted—and certainly not as fast.
Can Run Any App, As Long as It’s in Oracle Cloud
Oracle’s news on Aug. 14 fell into line with all of this. The company announced that its prize jewel, the highly proprietary Oracle Exadata database, is now available to run any application a customer wants on the Oracle cloud infrastructure.
Note that it still has to run on the Oracle cloud—not AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure—so there is still a modicum of restriction involved.
“Customers using our infrastructure are able to bring applications to the cloud never previously possible, without the cost of re-architecture, and achieve incredible performance throughout the stack,” Oracle Cloud Vice President of Product and Strategy Kash Iftikhar told eWEEK. “From front-end application servers to database and storage, we are optimizing our customers’ most critical applications.”
The move opens a new world of possibilities for enterprises that already have Oracle deployments. Now they can migrate database applications and data warehouses and develop new extreme performance cloud applications.
Key Features
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers the following features:
- self-provisioning of multiple bare metal servers in less than five minutes with each supporting over 4 million IOPS;
- block storage that linearly scales by 60 IOPS per gigabyte;
- 100 percent compatibility with Oracle databases deployed on-premises, ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud, and an efficient hybrid cloud strategy; and
- an expanded geographical footprint into the U.S. West (Phoenix, Ariz.) region.
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