Oracle AI World took over Las Vegas last week, as attended by SDxCentral sister title DCD, with the so-called fourth hyperscaler setting out its stall in all things cloud and automation.

As part of the raft of announcements from the event was the release of Oracle Acceleron, a cloud networking architecture bundled with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Where OCI's architecture previously relied on conventional three-tiered leaf-spine network designs, Acceleron is touted as dedicating separate network fabrics for different types of traffic, while offering a single zero-trust turnkey solution unavailable from hyperscale rivals.

According to newly-minted co-CEO Clay Magouyrk, Acceleron came from “AI workloads meaning much bigger cluster size, and they care a lot more about total throughput than the absolute lowest latency.” The chief exec described the new solution as a unified architecture that allows users to scale up and scale down the size of their dedicated networks.

“They can be either latency or throughput optimized, and all of this is configured in a secure and hard proficient manner that gives you all of the performance you expect from a dedicated network, but all of the security benefits you expect from a cloud, virtualized system,” Magouyrk said in a keynote attended by DCD.

What is Oracle Acceleron?

Acceleron spans fabric network architecture, fabric accelerators, and host network accelerators, and is designed to unify and streamline complex cloud network functions, storage, and security. According to Oracle, the solution leverages dedicated network fabrics and direct paths to minimize latency and variability.

Acceleron is said to support high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and large AI and machine learning (ML) clusters. It also supports Oracle Exadata, the vendor’s integrated enterprise database platform that combines both hardware and software.

A converged network interface card (NIC), meanwhile, is claimed to improve throughput and low-tail latency, while multiplanar network designs aim to augment security for network teams.

Specifically, Oracle users can connect NICs to multiple, isolated network planes and shift traffic promptly if one plane comes across issues, removing stalls and restarts from clusters to stay on schedule.

Oracle’s SmartNIC offering can also be partitioned into customer and provider planes, enabling storage acceleration over TCP with non-volatile memory express (NVMe), the high-speed storage protocol and interface designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs).

Acceleron’s SmartNIC provision was also touted as enabling line-rate encryption and allowing updates to the card on a bare-metal server, delivering up to double the improvement in throughput and twice the storage input/output per second (IOPS).

“With the converged NIC, you get all of the security benefits [and] an NVMe interface for block storage, you get line-rate encryption from all of your traffic. You get seamless patching of even your bare-metal hosting, so suddenly I can do bare metal but still patch your NIC for you, and you can get twice the available throughput for compute because you're not processing the packets twice,” Magouyrk claimed at the Oracle event.

The offering partly mirrors Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Nitro system, which offers purpose-built cards that offload networking, storage, and security functions from host CPUs – but these are managed by AWS rather than the user customizable form of SmartNIC.

Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) also offer similar features, along with IBM Cloud’s own SmartNIC provision.

Zero trust with Acceleron

Most unique perhaps is the Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR, pronounced zipper) available in Oracle Acceleron.

Originally launched last year as a tool in OCI, ZPR enforces zero trust policies at the network layer. If a packet's source and destination attributes do not align with a policy, the traffic is blocked, even if existing network security groups (NSGs) or security lists would have permitted it.

With its inclusion and update in Acceleron, ZPR expands coverage for services including MySQL, with improved visibility through a Network Path Analyzer (NPA) integration.

According to Oracle, the updates were developed to address specific security challenges, including lateral network movement. Spanning multiple virtual cloud networks (VCNs), ZPR’s can prevent lateral movement across VCNs, underpinned by a single policy. With it, internet-facing servers can only communicate with specific mid-tier services over secure protocols, and only those mid-tier services can access sensitive data in back-end databases, halting any attacker coming via a front-end node.

On the data exfiltration front, ZPR works with Private Service Access (PSA) to keep private data away from the public internet. PSA is said to handle the private routing of traffic to OCI services like Object Storage and Functions, while ZPR uses attribute-based policies to ensure that only trusted workloads are granted access.

Finally, to avoid misuse of compromised credentials, IAM Deny Policies can ensure tenancy-level guardrails, blocking access from untrusted paths even if a user has valid credentials.

“That means that even if someone were to steal some credentials that would, in theory, give them access to that object storage bucket, they can't get that data out through the internet,” Magouyrk explained.

Zero trust is nothing new in network security. According to Gartner, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) is seeing strong adoption among large and mid-market organizations, and the firm forecasts 10% of large enterprises will have a mature and measurable zero-trust program by 2026.

It’s also not unique to the hyperscalers. AWS users can enforce zero-trust access, but this capability is delivered across services rather than through one turnkey packet routing solution like Oracle’s.

GCP and Azure similarly offer zero trust protection spread across the cloud network, including identity engines, firewalls, and private engines.

With Acceleron's offering of a programmable NIC, alongside its turnkey zero trust solution, Oracle may have subtly marked itself out from other cloud providers – while barely using the term AI in its product description.