Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services debuts

I’m very excited to announce the general availability of the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services. At Oracle Open World, we announced our investments in an industry-first, modern Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform. The Bare Metal Cloud Services is our first offering built on that modern platform and there has been tremendous interest and engagement from customers worldwide.

Latest computing infrastructure, available on-demand

This is the first public cloud offering bare metal compute in a fully virtualised, high-performance network environment. The Bare Metal Cloud Services also provide integrated network block storage, object storage, identity and access management, VPN connectivity, and a software-defined Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). The VCN allows customers to treat the Bare Metal Cloud Services as a secure, elastic, extension of their on-premises network. The Services can be provisioned on-demand, by console or API, with pay-for-what-you-use billing.

The Services are available in a new Phoenix, Arizona region. The Phoenix region consists of three completely fault-independent Availability Domains (ADs) with less than one millisecond between ADs. This enables customers to build high-availability, high-durability applications in the cloud without sacrificing performance.

While our bare metal compute instances are ideal for the most demanding application requirements, they are also great for a variety of other customer use cases with diverse performance, reliability, and governance requirements. We plan to expand those use cases with a regular cadence of additional features including smaller compute resources (VMs), a load balancing service, as well as a database service, and additional regions, all coming soon. For more detail on the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services, visit cloud.oracle.com/bare-metal.

Oracle offers vastly superior cloud performance, governance, and flexibility

The Bare Metal Cloud Services are built to emulate a complete on-premises datacentre, yielding the operational control, security and isolation, and high, predictable performance that customers expect. 

nOur flat, non-blocking network enables customers to utilise maximum network bandwidth with mere microseconds of latency between nodes

• Denser servers and NVMe storage enable as much as four million IOPs per bare metal instance
• A host of features, including fully isolated bare metal instances, a high-security network, and complete virtual and physical network decoupling, enable uncompromisedsecurity 
• Customisable resource compartmentalisation and highly flexible access control provide strong governance
• Complete flexibility and workload portability: run your OS, your hypervisor, or your entire stack

Best price performance in the market enables countless business opportunities

We set out to offer the best price performance in the market. From a processing and storage perspective, this provides great value for demanding applications like Hadoop, transaction processing, real-time analytics, 3D rendering, and video encoding. Customers like Falkonry, an artificial intelligence company, can run double the amount of simulations at lower cost, enabling them to provide better services. Partners like uStudio, an enterprise video solutions company, have proven that they can transcode HD video nine times faster.

Our network pricing enables additional benefits. For example, we don't charge for traffic within or between availability domains. This means that you can deploy all of your applications with high availability – redundancy that's tolerant to power, network, site failure – with no network cost penalties. This is a perfect fit for scale-out databases like Datastax Enterprise, which requires three sites for high availability Cassandra Clusters. With our infrastructure and cost structure, zero-data-loss configurations like Oracle MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) can be the default for all your applications.

We offer up to 10 terabytes of free outbound bandwidth a month, and only charge $0.01/GB per month after that. That's not only more than 80% less than the other large cloud providers, but it unshackles different business models. For example, video providers can build an origin server on our cloud, transcode content faster with our compute, and serve the content much more economically to enterprise branch offices and CDNs. 

Better value for compute, storage, and networking – and simpler pricing.

Let’s get started, together

The team and I have been working on these services for the past few years and can’t wait for you to try them and see the difference. We’re passionate about the technology and we have a strong commitment to your success in the cloud. We hope you find the services compelling for your highest performance applications, as well as your sensitive applications that require the isolation, control, and low overhead that only bare metal can provide. Click here to learn more about the Services and to get started online. You can also contact your Oracle representative and ask for Bare Metal Cloud Services.

(The writer is VP of Product Development, Oracle Cloud Platform.)