Tech giant Oracle is expanding its Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio with the launch of Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine, the company announced yesterday. Enterprises will be able to deploy Oracle Exadata in a number of ways, including as a cloud service inside their own datacenter, in the Oracle Cloud or in a traditional on-premises environment, the company said.

"With [this] news, Oracle is offering organizations the ultimate in choice and flexibility in where they deploy the world's most advanced database cloud for mission-critical workloads," the company said in a statement.

Full Power of Public Cloud Inside a Data Center

Since it was first introduced over a year ago, Oracle Cloud at Customer has proved popular with enterprises as a way to help bridge the gap between public cloud and on-premises deployments. While organizations look forward to moving their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from moving their data and applications outside their own datacenters, Oracle said.

The Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is designed to deliver the full power of the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service that resides in Oracle's public cloud to customers that require or prefer their databases to be located on-premises, the company said.

"Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is an ideal platform for organizations that want the benefits of the cloud brought to their datacenter," said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technologies at Oracle, in the statement. "For many years, Oracle Exadata has been the platform of choice for running mission critical Oracle databases at thousands of customers, and the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine extends this value proposition to those customers who want cloud benefits but cannot or aren't yet ready to move to a public cloud."

Subscription-Based Pricing

The new service will provide enterprises with subscription access to the Oracle database with all its usual options and features, such as real application clusters, database in-memory, active data guard and advanced security, high levels of performance, availability and security features for mission-critical workloads, the company said.

Additionally, the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is 100 percent compatible with on-premises as well as Oracle Cloud applications and databases, ensuring any existing application can be quickly migrated to the cloud without changes.

Among the features included in Exadata Cloud Machine are a mission-critical database for OLTP; analytics; mixed workloads and consolidation; a database hardware platform with NVMe Flash,and InfiniBand networking; and an advanced database cloud platform with subscription-based pricing and real-time online capacity bursting.

Oracle said the flexible cloud can be deployed either in its public cloud or inside the customer's datacenter, with Oracle managing all of the infrastructure. The new service should also facilitate migration to the cloud with software and hardware that are fully compatible.

"The business model is just like a public cloud subscription; the hardware and software is the same; Oracle experts monitor and manage the infrastructure; and the same tools used in Oracle’s public cloud are used to provision resources on the Cloud Machine," the company said in the statement.