Expanding its cloud portfolio, Oracle has unveiled Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (Oracle IaaS) with "Capacity on Demand." “For the first time, you can get Oracle engineered systems deployed on premise behind your firewall for a monthly fee,” said Oracle president Mark Hurd, during a live webcast that presented details of the offering. Announced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld in 2012, Oracle IaaS enables organizations to deploy fully integrated engineered systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance in their data centers.
Preserving the security of on-premise deployments, the Oracle IaaS enables customers to configure the system to comply with internal or regulatory requirements. Additionally, data and encryption keys never leave the company and critical systems and data are kept private to the company.
According to Hurd, there are many customers, such as those in the banking sector, who want to use Oracle’s engineered systems in the cloud, but need an option for their data and servers to be located behind their firewall. An additional benefit of the IaaS approach is that it eliminates the upfront capital investment and so is OpEx not CapEx. “We own the hardware, we manage the hardware, we upgrade the hardware for you. This means that you can spread the costs over time.” As an additional benefit, he said, “You get capacity on demand, which gives you the processing power and the performance when you need it. You only pay for what you need; you can elastically scale up – and back down again.”
Beyond the three main deployment platforms – Exadata for database, Exalogic for middleware and applications, and SPARC SuperCluster for general purpose deployments – the IaaS approach also includes the Exalytics engineered system for analytics and the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance for extra storage, said Juan Loaiza, Oracle SVP Systems Technology. “The goal of Oracle Infrastructure as a Service is to provide many of the benefits of cloud computing for hardware infrastructure that is deployed in the customer’s data center. With Oracle IaaS, customers pay incrementally over time, they have capacity available elastically on demand, it is very fast to deploy like cloud applications, and also you get greatly reduced management, with all the benefits of on-premise systems,” said Loaiza.
The base term for the infrastructure as a service - or private cloud - offering is three years, said Loaiza, and customers can extend beyond three years on a quarterly basis. At the end of the agreement period, the hardware is returned back to Oracle, “The total cost of infrastructure as a service is usually lower than the cost of purchasing and it includes the Capacity on Demand offering.”
The IaaS comes with services to maximize performance, reliability and security, including Oracle Premier Support for Systems. In addition, Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster include Oracle Platinum Services and the new Oracle PlatinumPlus Services exclusively for Oracle IaaS customers.
For a replay of a live webcast on Oracle Infrastructure as a service presented by Hurd, Loaiza, and Javier Cabrerizo, Oracle vice president of business development, go here.
For the Oracle IaaS data sheet and FAQs, go here.