Oracle and Google expand service availability and add cross-region replication for disaster recovery

Oracle Corp. and Google LLC’s cloud unit today announced an expanded partnership with broader regional coverage, additional services aimed at disaster recovery and a low-cost entry offering for customers that want to adopt Oracle’s Exadata high-performance database platform.

Oracle Database@Google Cloud, which is a version of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that runs natively on Google Cloud, will expand to eight new regions with the addition of U.S. Central 1 (Iowa), North America-Northeast 1 (Montreal), North America-Northeast 2 (Toronto), Asia-Northeast 1 (Tokyo), Asia-Northeast 2
(Osaka), Asia-South 1 (Mumbai), Asia-South 2 (Delhi), and South America-East 1 (Sao Paulo). The service is currently available in U.S. East (Ashburn), U.S. West (Salt Lake City), U.K. South (London), and Germany Central (Frankfurt). The companies said data center capacity will also be doubled in the London, Frankfurt and Ashburn regions over the next 12 months.

Among the benefits of running Oracle software on the Google Cloud Platform the companies cited are simplified workload deployment; a simpler and more secure operating environment; native integration with Google Cloud’s console, application program interfaces, monitoring, and operations; easier purchasing and contracting via Google Cloud Marketplace using existing Google Cloud commitments; unified support; and available private, high-speed connectivity to OCI through Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud for scenarios such as data and application integration.

The expansion also gives Oracle access to businesses in some regions where regulations or practical concerns require services to be delivered locally, said Karan Batta, senior vice president at OCI. “For example, all the banks in India are pretty much standardized on Oracle,” he said. “They’re not going to deploy in a U.S. or European data center because of data sovereignty controls.”

Cross-region resilience

Oracle Database@Google Cloud is also being enhanced with cross-region disaster recovery and database replication specifically for the Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless edition.

New cross-region disaster recovery support allows customers to set up a replicated standby database in a separate Google Cloud region. Currently, replication is available only within a Google Cloud region. Customers can securely access their Oracle databases from anywhere through a public endpoint and restrict access to a set of approved IP addresses.

Oracle currently offers cross-region replication on its own cloud service. The new capabilities are for customers who want to use the Autonomous Database while accessing such Google services as Vertex AI and BigQuery.

“We have a big user base of enterprise customers who want to use the best of Oracle and the best of Google together,” said Andi Gutmans, vice president and general manager of databases at Google.

“This is a fully managed database service with extreme continuity, better recovery and data protection,” said Batta. “The Autonomous Database manages itself and also cross-region recovery.”

Batta said the offering should appeal to customers in highly regulated industries such as financial services that are currently using separate replication services like Oracle GoldenGate. He said cross-regional replication services will be expanded to other Oracle database offerings and cloud platforms in the future.

Exadata for less

The new single-node virtual machine cluster offering for Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure provides a simpler and cheaper version of Exadata to customers with lower processing demands or that need a separate development and test environment.

Previously, all VM clusters on the Exadata service had a minimum requirement of two VMs and databases running on two physical rack servers along with Oracle Real Application Clusters, which is a high-availability and scalability service that allows multiple servers to run a single Oracle Database instance simultaneously. The new single-node clusters don’t include RAC licenses.

“Many customers run appliances on-premises or expensive bare-metal nodes in the cloud,” Batta said. “They require the software capability Exadata provides at a fraction of the cost.” He said the savings customers could expect to achieve are “significant” but didn’t provide specifics.

The move continues Oracle’s efforts to lower entry barriers to customers that want to adopt Exadata in the cloud. Last July the company announced an offering that delivers high-speed query performance across multiple Exadata cloud instances at prices that are up to 95% lower than a dedicated service.

Oracle Database@Google Cloud customers can purchase Oracle Database services using their existing Google Cloud commitments and leverage existing Oracle license benefits, such as bring your own license and Oracle Support Rewards. Prices are custom-quoted.

Photo: Oracle