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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.