The enterprise cloud

The corona pandemic picked up speed. Video conferencing and audio chat grew at an exorbitant rate. US-based Zoom, one of the prominent and popular cloud meeting platform providers, saw user numbers shoot through the roof. This prompted Zoom to expand the cloud infrastructure services it uses from AWS and Azure.

Zoom also entered into talks with Oracle with the aim of being able to use on-demand cloud infrastructure services in a short time, or to obtain very high workloads together with storage capacities from the cloud provider Oracle. Zoom and Oracle reached an agreement on cloud usage in a short time, and the collaboration received immense media attention worldwide.

TV, business media and trade journals - print and online - also reported in German-speaking countries. Because of the Oracle Cloud, Zoom was able to easily increase the worldwide user base from 20 million to more than 300 million, and the Oracle Cloud Gen2 showed what it was capable of beyond the purely professional scene. Shortly thereafter, the U.S.-based video meeting platform 8X8 also chose Oracle Cloud Gen2.

Cloud Gen2

As the name "Cloud Gen2" expresses, this Oracle Cloud with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) represents a further development. Just as with AWS, Azure or GCP, Oracle had also implemented all the advantages of the Gen1 Cloud in its cloud from a basic technical construction point of view; but since they knew that they were behind the competitors with their market entry, the developers were given the following task: to eliminate mistakes that had been made with Gen1 Cloud platforms. And: to set up a completely new architecture, which was realized with the Gen2 Cloud.

For example, the focus of a Gen1 cloud is on the almost exclusive sharing of virtual machines, which are equipped with elastic resources and sufficient scalability and can therefore be used in self-service, i.e. they are characterized by user-friendly cloud services consumption. However, this results in performance losses and also so-called "noisy neighbors", right up to problems of security and compliance aspects.

The completely relaunched Oracle Gen2 was presented for the first time at the worldwide customer event Oracle Open World 2018 in San Francisco. Good or little optimizable features of the first generation were retained - with a conceptually fundamental new structure plus the addition of numerous optimizations. And this primarily with regard to the needs of large companies in terms of security and performance.

Performance like on-prem

Roughly outlined, there is no separation of user computer and cloud control computer in first generation clouds. This means that here anyone who has access to the cloud control or management mechanisms can also access customer data in one way or another.

Oracle Cloud Gen2 is different. Here, user computers and cloud control computers present themselves as connected, yet separate entities. This means that there is no direct access from cloud control computers to user computers and thus customer data from Oracle is in fact not visible. In addition, the control computers contain their own CPU (in addition to RAM and flash memory).

Gen1 versus Gen2

In terms of performance, Oracle Cloud Gen2 also shows differences compared to the first generation providers. This is particularly due to the fact that Oracle here exclusively provides (Intel) bare metal shapes or servers as the basis of its Infrastructure as a Service. In addition, Oracle uses faster components than other cloud platforms. Each cloud customer thus uses its own bare metal system, so to speak. At the same time, more available network bandwidth is made available between the components. An RDMA network is also used, which additionally increases performance.

Compared to first-generation clouds, there is also no so-called "VM noising" with sometimes considerable latency times or performance losses. VMs can of course be used on top (in addition to GPUs or containers). On the subject of performance, it can basically be said that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers the same level as on-premises - or even better. This has also been confirmed in tests or in comparisons with AWS, for example.

Nevertheless, performance is an important but not the only aspect when resorting to a cloud or using cloud IaaS services. The price-performance ratio should also be taken into account. Here, Oracle Cloud Gen2 with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can also shine in comparison with AWS, for example. In general, it can be said that customers receive more performance for less money. Both in the cloud procurement of compute, storage and network services.

In a comparison, for example, standard VM instances in another cloud (first generation) cost almost 50 percent more than in Oracle. For bare metal standard systems it is about 45 percent and for GPU instances it is about 26 percent. Another cloud is also more expensive for block storage (plus 7900 percent), as well as in the data archive area (plus 35 percent) or for outbound Internet data traffic (plus 1300 percent).

Holistic cloud services

As already explained, the Oracle Cloud is made for enterprise use. In this context, complete and very comprehensive cloud services are offered for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Database as a Service (DaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Listing all offerings would simply go beyond the scope here. Oracle also offers end-to-end infrastructure SLAs for availability, performance and manageability, which AWS, Azure and GCP do not offer in this way.

Important to know: Numerous partner solutions from a broad ecosystem can also be obtained via the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, including those from VMware or Microsoft (SQL Server or Windows), for example. VMware and Azure-direct-Link are generally released for OCI. However, there is no certification yet for SAP NetWeaver applications, which represent a special case in this scenario.

But in principle, Oracle is relying on openness with the inclusion of various partners in the Gen2 Cloud. And: Similar to the database environment, Oracle sees itself as a kind of premium provider with a high-performance enterprise cloud, which, however, offers more cost-effective and better services than the first generation cloud. The development and expansion of the Oracle Cloud (as of July 2020: 25 regions, a further 13 planned) is progressing rapidly worldwide.

SAP in the Oracle Cloud

SAP NetWeaver or SAP Legacy customers who, for example, have implemented many adaptations (customizing) of their SAP systems to their respective needs, have been able to access IaaS services of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as an element of Oracle Gen2 for quite some time. The basis for this is an SAP certification for OCI.

A number of SAP customers who have been using Oracle's market-leading database for years or decades are making use of this and have in some cases moved entire SAP data centers to the Oracle Cloud in order, for example, to have their backs free for innovations or also to be able to use Oracle innovations.

For example, a major tech retailer moved its SAP data center, including SAP applications, to the Oracle cloud in less than eight weeks (using special Oracle cloud processes and Terraform scripts, for example) and reports significant performance improvements as well as cost savings compared to on-prem operations.

With SAP's announcement of the extension of SAP Classic support (2027/2030), Oracle expects SAP Oracle NetWeaver customers to increasingly turn to Oracle Cloud. Even those that rely on Oracle Exadata Database Machine for SAP infrastructure, for example. Or those who are urged to carry out a rotational hardware refresh for their SAP Classic use, which is still targeted for a longer period of time.

Also possible in connection with the Oracle Cloud: the operation of so-called hybrid approaches. Since Oracle was and is the leading database provider for existing SAP customers, some SAP instances or modules, or test/dev versus production, can continue to be operated both in the company's own data center (on-prem) and in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Cloud harmonizes with on-prem

Important for SAP customers is the fact that there is effectively no difference between cloud and on-prem. Advantage of this: Application, database, operation, expertise or previous experience - everything can continue to be used as before. In addition, Oracle Engineered Systems, such as Exadata - and thus the well-known and often used Oracle features RAC (Real Application Clusters) and ASM (Automatic Storage Management) - can be used in a highly available and secure manner both on-prem and in the cloud. In addition, connections to other cloud platforms are possible and thus the realization of a multi-cloud strategy.