Oracle is planning to open three more data centres in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries by next year in a bid to up the game against Amazon Web Services.
The US software giant is planning to open one more data centre in the UAE, likely in Dubai, and two in Saudi Arabia as part of their “in-country” dual region strategy to help customers address disaster recovery and compliance needs and expand the footprint for Microsoft Azure interconnect.
Big tech companies have shown interest in the Middle East, especially in the UAE, to open data centres. Amazon Web Services has a cluster of data centres in Bahrain and the UAE.
Oracle already opened its first data centre in the UAE this year in Abu Dhabi while Microsoft opened its data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi recently.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has already invested in the one data centre in the UAE while Huawei is also set to open its data centre in the UAE this year.
Oracle announced at the OpenWorld that it plans to launch 20 new Oracle Cloud regions by the end of 2020, for a total of 36 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions compared to 25 for Amazon Web Services.
Oracle has opened 12 regions in the past year and currently operates 16 regions globally—11 commercial and five government—the fastest expansion by any major cloud provider by opening an average of one region every 23 days over the next 15 months.
High availability round-the-clock
Karan Batta, director of product management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told TechRadar Middle East that most of our customers are running mission-critical applications today that require high availability while the data centres will be completely isolated from each other and can withstand the failure of each other, with different power sources and networks.
“Every time we go to a region, we have plans for a second region [more data centres] in that country for various reasons such as data residency, natural disaster and high availability for our customers to build highly available applications without crossing borders. It is an orders-of-magnitude difference when compared to Amazon Web Services,” he said.
Most of the packaged applications such as PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, he said, require very high availability to run round-the-clock with guarantees that customers want from a back-office application standpoint.
“For that, we need a second data centre in a country. With these dual regions, customers can deploy both production and disaster recovery capacity within their country or jurisdiction to meet business continuity and compliance requirements.”
Building intelligence into every layer of the cloud
Moreover, Batta said that Oracle is the only company delivering a complete and integrated set of cloud services and building intelligence into every layer of the cloud.
“There is a change in strategy in the last few years. We have an autonomous database and autonomous applications. If you look at other cloud providers, everybody has compute, storage and networking at the end of the day.
“We have built compute, storage, database, networking and services a little bit differently in a bid to tune to our customers,” he said.
Furthermore, he said that other cloud providers offer pre-selected products and services by “lift, edit and shift” but Oracle provides “lift and shift” method to move your 10-year old OS and virtualize it.
“Our model is move in and improve. Amazon gives you a bunch of Lego bricks and tells you to build your own. It is our responsibility to protect you and we are going to have foolproof services,” he said.
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