Oracle Announces Cloud Data Centers in Bid to Compete with AWS
By Oracle went after the jugular at Amazon this week, launching a crop of cloud data centers that will help the company go head to head against AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. The new centers will offer IaaS at a low price point, and Oracle is hoping to make the company a serious contender in the cloud infrastructure market, where Amazon’s solid lead has been steadily eroding.
The new cloud data centers will be powered by the Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server solution, featuring 36 CPU cores, 512 GB of DRAM and 28.8 TB of SSD storage. Geared toward high-performance workloads, the servers offer more power at a lower price point than AWS. According to Deepak Patil, vice president of product development at Oracle, the company was able to keep its price point low since its cloud platform is built on Oracle hardware.
Making in-roads on the virtualization front as well, Oracle is also offering four- and eight-core VMs and will make one- and two-core VMs available by the end of the year. The offerings are significant as Oracle steadily transitions from its bread and butter of selling traditional software licenses to the subscription services model gaining in popularity among enterprises and SMBs alike. And while the company has already realized success with its SaaS and PaaS offerings, IaaS is the next logical competitive move, according to co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison.
“Amazon's lead is over,” said Ellison in his keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week. “Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward. We now have a tech advantage over Amazon in infrastructure as a service.”
AWS has maintained a significant market lead in IaaS over the past decade, generating $7.9 billion in sales last year according to some estimates. That number is eight times what Microsoft’s Azure IaaS offering brought in, while Google’s Cloud Platform brought in approximately one-sixteenth of that number. In other words, Oracle has some work to do to become a serious contender in the IaaS space. In their favor is their large entrenched enterprise customer base, which may come along for the ride with them as they make the steady migration to the cloud.
For now, the new Oracle IaaS solutions will be available in the western U.S. on October 13. The eastern U.S. is expected to be online by the end of the year, with England and Germany targeted for availability by June of 2017.
Edited by Alicia Young
