Oracle Hybrid Cloud Roves Out to the Edge

Oracle launched a new edge infrastructure product that extends its hybrid cloud reach out to more diverse locations and joins a similar push made by its larger hyperscale rivals. Oracle launched a new edge infrastructure product that extends its hybrid cloud reach out to more diverse locations and joins a similar push made by its larger hyperscale rivals. The Roving Edge Infrastructure product is a quasi-roving box that fits into edge locations. It includes a complete software and hardware package that acts as a server in an edge location that can provide core infrastructure services. It can support cloud applications and workloads like machine learning inference, real-time data integration and replication, augmented analytics, and query-intensive data warehouses. And it also promises the edge mantra of low-latency processing closer to the end user. Each box acts as a connection-independent extension of a customers’ Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Each Roving Edge Device (RED) includes 40 CPU cores, 512 gigabytes of RAM, 61 terabytes of storage, and multiple Ethernet connection options. Between five and 15 nodes can be connected into a single cluster. Each of those nodes runs $160 per day. Ross Brown, VP for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, explained that the box provides OCI customers with an easy-to-deploy option to expand their operational reach. “You load virtual machines onto it, you load your object storage from your environment onto it, click done, and then we ship it to you,” Brown explained in an interview with SDxCentral. “There should be no difference between what’s running in this environment and what’s running in the cloud.” As for that shipping, Brown also explained that security measures included a tamper evident seal on the outside of the enclosure, a PIN code being required to activate the device, or there is an “air-gapped” pickup facility for those that want to keep their hands on the device. The device itself has a “three-year lifespan,” though Brown said that’s mostly tied to when Oracle expects the components will need a “refresh.” “We’re not going to pull one out of a production environment and insist you return it at the end of three years,” he explained. “It’s more as it comes back and it hits the three-year mark we refresh it with new hardware and swap out the device.” The platform is similar to what Amazon Web Services (AWS) does with its Snow family of physical devices that are designed to run outside the data center or Microsoft with its Azure Data Box Edge. However, Brown noted that the Oracle product is different in that it’s supported in all of the vendor’s public regions and has access to all of Oracle’s services from launch as opposed to rival systems that are often limited in their abilities. “Our public regions are built on a different model of architecture meaning we don’t build a public region the way other cloud providers do where we build out the infrastructure and then we start layering in services one at a time,” Brown said. “We’ve automated all of our clouds so that when we stand up a data center all services are available at the same time. And as we roll the new service out it rolls out in all regions at once. So that’s a differentiator by rethinking the approach to the hardware that has enabled us to get to 29 regions so far that are live.” The service joins Oracle’s growing hybrid cloud focus that includes its Oracle Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer services and its VMware Cloud Solution. The Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer service is a fully managed private cloud that brings all of Oracle’s cloud services into customers’ data centers. It was launched last July as a rival to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) edge-focused Outposts service. The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution was launched in 2019, and pairs VMware Cloud Foundation with OCI to allow customers to migrate VMware workloads between their on-premises data centers and Oracle’s public cloud using consistent infrastructure and tools. The service relies on Layer 2 networking in the cloud and on Oracle’s bare metal service. VMware offers similar services with all the major hyperscalers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud.