Oracle wants to compete with Amazon AWS with data center update

Oracle is updating its infrastructure-as-a-service with the aim of trumping its main competitor Amazon. Oracle’s most powerful offering offers 36 cores after the update. To enhance its cloud offering, Oracle acquires security firm Palerra.

The second generation of Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service was announced by Oracle President and CTO Larry Ellison at the company’s OpenWorld conference. The CEO focused in particular on market leader Amazon. According to Ellison, Oracle’s Dense Cloud IO server offering is more powerful and less expensive than Amazon’s most powerful offering from Amazon’s AWS platform.

Oracle’s Dense Cloud IO offers 36 cores, 512GB of RAM and 28.8TB of SSD storage, at an hourly price that would be 20 percent lower than Amazon’s. Oracle is still well behind Amazon, but also competitors such as Microsoft, IBM and Google, SRG Research calculated at the beginning of August.

Oracle will run its infrastructure redundantly over three so-called Availability Domains. For hosts within such a domain, the bandwidth is 10Gbit/s with a latency of less than 100 microseconds, between domains within a region Oracle lays 1Tb/s lines and the latency is less than 5ms. Initially, Oracle will update its infrastructure in its Arizona data centers, followed by England and Germany in June next year.

Oracle also announced Cloud@Customer. The company installs hardware and software such as it uses for its Public Cloud platform at customer data centers. They then rent the platform and have the advantage that it is located behind the firewall of the company and that Oracle takes care of the management and maintenance. During OpenWorld, Oracle will also announce its acquisition of Palerra. This company focuses on responding as quickly as possible to security incidents in cloud services. To this end, the company is developing a tool that analyzes user behavior in online services. An acquisition amount has not been disclosed.