The cloud has finally reached the point where mission-critical enterprise workloads do not just run in the cloud but are also developed for the cloud. Research indicates that 58% of enterprise workloads are running in either a hybrid cloud or private cloud, a percentage that will continue to climb.1
Today’s cloud infrastructure—hardware, databases, applications, virtualization layers and security frameworks—can be designed, deployed and optimized for blindingly fast performance for many workloads. However, that’s not enough when it comes to mission-critical workloads. Customers are more demanding because outages, lack of performance or security issues can bring their core business to a halt. Customers that are moving enterprise applications to the cloud require the databases supporting those applications to provide the same or superior performance, availability and security compared with what they currently have on premises. These cloud solutions must also deliver easier management through automation while eliminating Capex investments, so customers can focus their resources on growing their businesses.
Unfortunately, many public cloud infrastructures are not well aligned with the demanding performance, scalability, availability and security requirements for mission-critical databases. Whether for online transaction processing (OLTP) or online analytical processing applications, access to these databases must be near instantaneous, even as data continues to grow and database workloads scale. However, most public clouds use generic server and storage technologies that cannot scale database performance or come close to on-premises database I/O latencies and throughput—key factors that limit transactional and analytical performance.
Another option some organizations consider is to move part of their application stack to a public cloud and run the rest in their data center. However, unless a customer’s data center and that of the public cloud provider are within a few kilometers of each other, this approach will create “speed of light” problems that will slow down the overall solution.
This makes it seem like moving enterprise applications to the cloud is an all-or-nothing proposition, but it isn’t. Fortunately, a third approach delivers higher cloud-based database performance while at the same time ensuring proper controls for security, data protection, data access and data sovereignty.
Running Enterprise Database Services in the Cloud With Oracle Exadata
This third approach—a middle road, if you will—is to bring the cloud into customers’ data centers with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M.
Oracle Exadata is the best place to run all types of Oracle Database workloads, whether they are in customers’ data centers or in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centers. The Exadata platform is co-engineered with Oracle Database so customers can accelerate crucial transactional applications, develop greater business insights by rapidly analyzing larger data warehouses, and reduce costs by consolidating database operations onto significantly fewer and easier to manage platforms.
With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M—based on 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors—organizations run OLTP applications faster using unique Intel® Optane™ persistent memory and optimizations that reduce SQL read latency to under 19 microseconds and deliver more than 22 million SQL IOPS. They run analytics faster with scan rates of up to 540 GB per second using the processing power of intelligent storage servers. And they reduce costs by consolidating multiple workloads onto less infrastructure with up to 996 vCPUs of database compute power, 769 TB of usable storage, and software optimizations that ensure that latency-sensitive operations complete first and all databases get their fair share of resources.
Constellation Research: Oracle Exadata X9M and Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M Enable Rapid Enterprise Acceleration
Read this report for an overview of how the next-generation Oracle Exadata X9M and Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M enable rapid enterprise acceleration and looks at the key differentiators of both offerings overall.
Download NowExadata Cloud@Customer is uniquely suited for organizations that run mission-critical databases and want to take advantage of cloud automation and pay-per-use economics. Bringing a high-performance database cloud into customers’ data centers eliminates concerns about meeting performance or availability goals, losing control of data, suffering security breaches, having to move complex application stacks and running workloads in multi-tenant public clouds.
Because Exadata Cloud@Customer is deployed inside customers’ data centers and behind their firewalls, they can meet data sovereignty and security requirements while still taking advantage of cloud automation and economics. Customers can use Exadata Cloud@Customer to replace existing generic server and storage infrastructure running Oracle Database without disrupting complex application and database dependencies. In fact, many customers that don’t have data sovereignty requirements, like Dialog Semiconductor, use Exadata Cloud@Customer as a stepping-stone to the public cloud—ensuring that their applications, databases and operations are cloud-ready before making their final move.
In short, Exadata Cloud@Customer provides the simplest and fastest transition to a cloud database with pay-per-use economics, superior performance, cloud automation and agility in customer data centers.
For more information about Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M, please click here.
1 “Hybrid Cloud by the Numbers, 2020: 10 Stats to See,” The Enterprisers Project, July 27, 2020
