Oracle is integrating its cloud services with its on-premises network-attached storage (NAS) system to give customers the ability to move data and applications to the cloud without having to use external cloud gateways or pay cloud entrance taxes. Cloud entrance taxes are the fees companies pay on-premises vendors for access to the public cloud from their infrastructure platforms.

Oracle claims it’s the first cloud provider to do this. And it says it can save companies up to 87 percent total cost of ownership compared to competitors.

Oracle said that by combining its storage with cloud, it makes it easier for companies to do their own public cloud integration, manage security, and provide end-to-end visibility, diagnostics, and support. Oracle added that most on-premises NAS providers cannot offer this type of converged product because they don’t provide public cloud services, and public cloud providers don’t have on-premises NAS storage systems.

Specifically, the company is combining its Oracle Storage Cloud with its ZFS Storage appliances giving customers the ability to use the converged storage for elastic application storage, back-up and recovery, development, testing, active archive storage, and snapshot replica storage. Plus, it provides DevOps with a single API for both on-premises and in the Oracle Storage Cloud.

In response to queries from SDxCentral, Oracle said that customers that are using Oracle ZFS Storage appliances will receive a free upgrade giving them access to the Oracle Storage Cloud directly from their appliance.

Oracle’s latest update of its ZFS storage software includes an extension of the Oracle Database dynamic automation capabilities that provides better performance and decreases the need for manual storage tuning. It also includes all-Flash storage pools that increase application performance.

Oracle has been aggressively growing its cloud business. In the company’s fiscal third quarter earnings released earlier this month, it reported total cloud revenues for the quarter of $1.2 billion, up 62 percent from the same period last year.

The company has repeatedly said it is the fastest growing cloud company compared to its competitors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud because it is still experiencing strong growth while its competitors are seeing their growth slow down.