Oracle is targeting distributed delivery of its compute services with the launch of Compute Cloud@Customer, a new addition to its distributed cloud portfolio that runs Oracle's compute, storage and networking infrastructure services in customer data centers, Oracle VP of Systems Product Management Jason Schaffer told SDxCentral.

The new distributed cloud service is designed to allow customers to develop, deploy, secure and manage workloads using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) software stack in their own on-premises data centers. This provides organizations with consistent cloud services across distributed environments, Schaffer said.

Specifically, that means customers can develop an application once in a central location and use infrastructure-as-code to deploy that application everywhere. "This reduces the amount of IT skills and specialized expertise needed in remote locations and makes it easier to operate consistently across the country or around the world," he said.

The scalable nature of Compute Cloud@Customer, he added, is "crucial for this concept. ... Many remote locations may need different amounts of compute or storage capabilities in different locations and [need to] be able to grow those capabilities whenever needed." This offer is capable of 12x compute scalability and 20x storage scalability, he touted.

Compute Cloud@Customer also works to reduce costs. "Memory-intensive applications don’t need to provision more cores just to get the memory they need, and compute-intensive applications don’t have to consume more memory than they need," Schaffer explained.

The offering supports flexible VM shapes that range from 1 to 96 processor cores and 1 GB to 64GB of memory per core, Schaffer said. "This enables traditional applications or those that benefit from having a large, shared compute or memory footprint to run at high performance, while cloud-native applications that need more VMs but smaller memory footprints can run efficiently on the same infrastructure," he explained.

Customers are still responsible for on-premises data center energy, cooling and connection to the internet, but Oracle provides the necessary physical infrastructure while supporting "the same compute shapes and storage services" as the vendor's other cloud infrastructure. Customers then choose a system configuration with "an envelope of compute and storage capacity suitable for their ongoing and peak requirements," and the vendor installs and activates the system.

Data associated with the service is encrypted, and the vendor lets organizations control data locality, replication and backups to address data residency and privacy requirements. Those residency requirements are typically based on country, industry or company best practices. But "across the world, privacy laws and data regulations are tightening," Schaffer said. "This adds urgency to the need for localizing data, data compute and, in some cases, ensuring that the data never leaves the customer premises."

Oracle's new offering complements its existing Exadata Cloud@Customer, which runs OCI Database platform services like Oracle Autonomous Database on a rack-scale platform. When combined with the compute offer, "it is the ideal platform for workloads that are tightly integrated with Oracle databases," Schaffer said.

Compute Cloud@Customer is "also a strong complement to OCI Dedicated Region, since it can be used as a direct extension of such an environment to distributed locations, creating the distributed cloud infrastructure required for complex use cases such as deployment of 5G services and sovereign clouds for government," he added.