Oracle’s New Cloud Infrastructure to Give Amazon a Run for Its Money on the Cloud

At Oracle OpenWorld 2018, that started on October 22 in San Francisco, California, Larry Ellison, Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer at Oracle,officially launched Oracle’s newer and smarter cloud infrastructure solutions.

These second generation solutions – ‘Star Wars Cyber Defences’ – have a new feature of  ‘Impenetrable Barriers’, making cloud much safer for enterprise usage.  It boasts of a network of dedicated cloud control computers that serve to block threats. It also features ‘Autonomous Robots that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify and destroy security threats, at zero downtime.

Recognizing the need for much more stringent and smart security solutions, Ellison, in his keynote presentation acknowledged that the current cloud technologies, even the state of the art ones- are just not adequate to combat the data theft and cyber-attacks that are rampant today. These attacks have targeted and had huge impacts on the world’s largest and most critical tech-companies. The list includes Google, Facebook and Amazon, and even the United States Department of Defense, Pentagon. He maintained that while it was easy to talk bot a secure cloud, building one wasn’t that easy. In his keynote presentation he traced the journey that Oracle undertook to incrementally add various autonomous capabilities to its cloud solutions over the last decade. He spoke of the release of 9i to the current release 18c, and explained how the fully Autonomous Gen 2 cloud infrastructure solution came into being and launched in the market.

Oracles Gen 2 cloud infrastructure that he launched, runs on Oracle’s Self-Driving, Self-Securing and Self-Repairing Autonomous database. This, he said, will offer high security, performance, and cost savings for the cloud adopters. This solution uses the most modern technologies that ensure the solution is robust enough to cut back on the human error factor, ensuring automatic fault detection through machine learning algorithms, and helps to rectify these faults almost immediately. In a humorous streak he said, enterprises were not fighting security threats with both hands tied behind their back any more!

But the significant takeaway from this launch was the showcase of Oracle’s superiority over amazon that was demonstrated at the launch. Ellison himself spoke of the gaps in various different areas – performance and cost gaps based on the benchmark test results that compared Oracle’s Autonomous database against Amazon’s key offerings – Oracle Database running on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift. He claimed that Oracle would cut the adopters’ “Amazon bill by 50%”, by much faster speed matrices- almost 5x to 10x faster, offering 99.995% SLA guarantees compared to 99.95% of Amazon, and guaranteeing a 25x more reliable Autonomous database than Amazon.

And the icing on the cake would be the guaranteed 50% lower cost of running compared to Amazon.

The event launch was attended by nearly 60,000 delegates from 175 countries over the four-day event, which concludes on 25^thOctober.