Oracle Shrinks Its On-prem Cloud Into A Single Rack

Oracle has squeezed the on-prem version of its cloud into a version that fits into a single datacenter rack if required.

The offering, dubbed "Compute Cloud@Customer," repeats the approach Big Red uses with its Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer – bundling the stack it uses to power its hyperscale cloud into a collection of hardware that the database giant manages. The on-prem rig is a carbon copy of Oracle Cloud – other than being tuned to run in on-prem hardware – and therefore allows hybrid cloud operations and consistent app development environments in your own datacenter and a hyperscale environment.

When it launched in 2020, Oracle expected buyers of Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to spend at least $18 million over three years.

But in 2022, Oracle shrank the offering and set a floor spend of $1 million a year for four years. When Big Red announced the smaller on-prem Cloud@Customer it also previewed a rack-scale version.

That offering debuted on Wednesday.

Base configuration for Compute Cloud@Customer offers 552 fourth-gen AMD EPYC cores, 6.7TB of memory and 150TB of usable storage, all in a single rack.

Oracle states buyers can add "similar sized increments, with up to 2,208 cores available in a single rack and 6,624 cores overall." Which, doing the math, suggests this product maxes out at three racks.

VMs can be assigned between 1GB and 64GB of memory per core. Users can even create a VM wielding 96 cores and 960GB of memory. Storage can be apportioned into your desired configuration – be it object, block, or file.

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Big Red reckons these rigs trounce the on-prem power available from rivals like Microsoft's Azure Stack or AWS’s Outposts, and at $53/core/month they do better on price too.

Pricing is based on consumption, for both cores and storage.

Oracle hasn't mentioned a required floor price for these rigs

Oracle's schtick for its on-prem clouds is that some customers have regulatory requirements that make them necessary, and/or latency-sensitive apps that can't tolerate a public cloud environment. The database giant also suggests its captive clouds are used alongside the Exadata machines it suggests as the best way to run its applications.

Doing so means "You also get a single-vendor environment for distributed cloud resources in your datacenter that's all managed from the same console and maintained by one, proven provider, Oracle."

You also put all your eggs in one basket – an approach to procurement The Register has often heard is unwise. It reduces competitive tension and ties you to a single source of innovation. On the other hand it also provides a "one throat to choke" model. ®