Oracle Pushes Cloud Transformation for Multicloud, Dedicated Regions at CloudWorld 2024

Oracle continues to grow its cloud portfolio with a series of updates announced at the company's CloudWorld 2024 event.

A key theme at Oracle CloudWorld, which took place Sept. 9-12 in Las Vegas, was multicloud. Oracle is now embedding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) data centers inside other cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft Azure in an effort to provide seamless access to Oracle data services.

That doesn't mean Oracle is pulling back on its own OCI efforts. Oracle is launching new private cloud options in addition to public cloud, including dedicated regions for large customers and sovereign clouds for countries wanting to keep data within their borders.

"When we moved into the very exciting world of cloud that offered a lot of tremendous benefits, it seems like we lost one thing," Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle, said during his CloudWorld keynote. "We lost the idea that customers could buy technology from many different companies and those technologies work gracefully together."

Ushering in the Multicloud Era

Ellison proclaimed that it is the dawn of the multicloud era, marking a significant shift in Oracle's approach to cloud services.

Oracle's Ellison at CloudWorld 2024: "When we moved into the very exciting world of cloud … we lost the idea that customers could buy technology from many different companies and those technologies work gracefully together."

"We're entering a new phase where services on different clouds work gracefully together," he declared. 

Related:Best Practices for Moving to a Multicloud Strategy

This new strategy involves embedding OCI data centers within other major cloud providers. The partnership with AWS took center stage at the event, with Ellison announcing that Oracle's Exadata database service will be available inside AWS data centers starting this December.

Dedicated Region 25: Bringing Cloud to Every Corner

Beyond public cloud integration, Ellison emphasized Oracle's commitment to providing diverse cloud solutions. Those include dedicated regions for large customers requiring exclusive cloud environments. 

Oracle Executive Vice President Clay Magouyrk provided more details during a keynote of his own at Oracle CloudWorld 2024 about some of the new dedicated cloud options that Oracle is launching. At the forefront of Oracle's innovations is Dedicated Region 25, a compact solution that brings full cloud functionality to spaces as small as three racks.  

Magouyrk underscored the significance of Dedicated Region 25 by noting that the ability to fit an entire cloud region into a small space is a noteworthy achievement. This breakthrough addresses critical needs for low latency and data sovereignty, potentially revolutionizing cloud deployment in industries with strict regulatory requirements or remote operations.

Related:Cross-Cloud: The Next Evolution in Cloud Computing?

"The ability to scale down allows us to deliver cloud in locations that were not previously possible," Magouyrk said.

Contrasting with the compact Dedicated Region, Oracle introduced its superclusters, designed to support massive AI workloads. These clusters can harness more than 131,000 GPUs simultaneously, pushing the boundaries of data center design.

"Inside one of these networks there are 300 quadrillion packets per second that can be sent, and with an acceptable drop rate of zero," Magouyrk said.

Customer Success Stories: OCI in Action

Oracle's cloud efforts are already having impact in real-world deployments.

Multiple organizations at CloudWorld 2024 detailed their respective cloud use cases and how OCI is making a difference. Among them was Gregory Brentin, senior vice president of technology at Skydance Animation.

Brentin explained how Skydance uses OCI to connect three studios together that handle intensive creative workloads across geographically dispersed teams.

"We have to connect those teams together, allow them to collaborate, allow them to share content, give each other feedback, and move that creative process along every day," Brentin said.

Uber is another OCI user that is using the cloud platform in real-world deployments. Kamran Zargahi, senior director of tech strategy at Uber, provided details about how his company uses OCI.

"Out of every 10 trips that Uber serves for our customers, a few of them actually are powered by Oracle and OCI, and that's targeted to be doubled next year," Zargahi said.

Uber and OCI's partnership aims to drive efficient, scalable growth. Zargahi highlighted specific OCI features that benefit Uber.

"OCI provides a lot of great features for us such as Arm-based systems, moving data across regions, and these are key factors to making those seamless experiences happen," he said.