Oracle launched their innovative Next-Generation Cloud Infrastructure at the Oracle Open World conference last October, and it’s been getting rave reviews ever since – changing the ways in which businesses can move to and operate in the Cloud.
Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud was built from the ground up to better accommodate enterprise functions, leverage a business’ existing technology, and optimize security – all while maximizing performance and cutting costs.
So, how it is different from the first-generation Cloud? Oracle’s Second-Generation Cloud Infrastructure rises above older Cloud technologies because it was developed with the following capabilities and features in mind.
Accommodates Enterprise-Level Workloads
Previously, clouds were built for primarily web-based applications; they were not designed for traditional enterprise systems. Many enterprise workloads – often bulky, complex, and deployed on-premise – couldn’t easily be migrated or wouldn’t function in a Gen 1 virtual environment.
Kyle York, Oracle’s VP, said in a recent Q&A, “First generation public cloud offerings were not architected to accommodate traditional application architectures. They were architected for net-new cloud native applications. Think websites, mobile apps, or ecommerce storefronts—certainly not financial systems, government workloads, or data-intensive applications.”
In fact, a Forrester Study showed that only 15%-30% of enterprise workloads have been successfully migrated to the cloud. The Next Generation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was developed to change that.
Leverages Existing Technology
Many businesses have made large investments in on-premises technology, so they are reasonably hesitant when it comes to dumping those investments in favor of migrating to the Cloud.
To combat this issue, Oracle does not force businesses to give up their on-premise systems, but instead utilizes those existing systems and extends them into the OCI.
They can do this with a wide array of deployment options including bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, serverless, on-premise systems and network connectivity options that enable hybrid cloud deployments and management.
Centered Around Security
Security is a top priority in choosing enterprise infrastructure, and security concerns are often cited as why enterprise businesses have been slow to move to the Cloud. This is another key issue that OCI sought to address.
Unlike Gen 1 Clouds, the Gen 2 OCI keeps customer code, data and other resources in a bare metal environment (a single-tenant, dedicated physical server), while Oracle’s control code lives on a separate machine with different architecture. With this approach, Oracle cannot see customer data, and there is no user access to the cloud control code.
Additionally, OCI isolates every customer’s traffic in a completely private overlay network, ensuring that no customer can see any other customer’s data or traffic. OCI also utilizes the latest in AI and machine learning to foresee and prevent potential data threats.
Provides Peak Performance & Pricing
Since OCI’s inception, a primary goal was to provide better performance than the rest of the market at the best pricing possible. (Check out a performance comparison between AWS and OCI.)
In the past, if you tried to run an enterprise application in a Gen 1 Cloud, it usually cost more than running it on-premises, but that’s not the case for OCI.
Additionally, Oracle’s highly scalable, flat network design limits the number of network hops between computing and storage to a maximum of two, making it perform much faster than the competition.
By allowing companies to run traditional and cloud-native workloads on the same platform, OCI users can reduce operational overhead and costs, while enabling connectivity and shared data between workloads.
OCI’s innovations are helping to revolutionize Cloud technologies, and your business can be on the forefront of that revolution.
If you’re interested in how OCI can improve your business, we’d love to discuss it with you. Contact us.