Introduction to Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC)

Over the past few years, the public cloud adoption has become mainstream and the enterprises take advantage of the cloud in term of cost reduction, agility, flexibility, automation and self-service activities.

But it exists a large portion of critical workloads that due to regulatory and performance-related contraints, cannot currently be moved to the public cloud. To solve those restrictions, Oracle has engineered a unique solution named Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC).

Designed as alternative to the OCI public cloud, it offers the same services at the same conditions available on the OCI public regions, inside the customer’s data center.

The main use cases for the DRCC adoption are associated to the following constraints:

  1. Data Sovereignty
  2. Security and Control
  3. Network Latency

Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty generally refers to government efforts to prevent their citizens’ data from falling into the wrong hands via measures that restrict how businesses can transfer personal information beyond their country’s borders. Those measures can be in the form of regulations—think General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, which regulates data privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area as well as the transfer of personal data from those regions, or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which gives citizens the right to know what personal information companies collect about them and how it is used and shared.

source: https://www.oracle.com/security/saas-security/data-sovereignty/

Security and Control

Restricting the physical access to the data center to special granted employees, and keeping the data behind the company’s firewall.

Network Latency

Specific applications (like trading or Voice over IP) are very sensitive to the increase of the network latency, therefore cannot be easily relocated to the public cloud.


DRCC Overview

As previously mentioned, the DRCC implementation offers the same services at the same conditions available on the OCI public region, for a full list of OCI services and associated SLA please check this link.

The main differences between the DRCC and the OCI region are:

  • It is built inside the customer’s premises
  • Data never leaves the customer’s premises
  • The infrastructure is remotely managed by Oracle
  • All resources are dedicated to one tenant

High level DRCC architecture

List of currently available major DRCC services


DRCC Benefits

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer brings all public cloud capabilities on-premises, so the enterprises can reduce infrastructure and operational costs, upgrade legacy applications on modern cloud platform, and meet the most demanding regulatory, data residency and latency requirements:

  • Bring all existing OCI services (at the time of this blog post around 80) including the Autonomous Database, eliminating any technical debt.
  • Leading cloud performance
  • Security-first architecture that reduces the risk and attack surfaces
  • Keep full control of all data to meet the most demanding data privacy and latency requirements.
  • Pay only for the services consumed and during the utilization period.
  • Deploy seamlessly between on-premises and public cloud, using the exact same tools, APIs, and SLA available in OCI and DRCC.
  • Single-vendor cloud accountability and management for all cloud platform, database, and infrastructure


Conclusion

Oracle DRCC unique characteristics offers cloud-scale security, resiliency and superior performance, allowing to meet the most stringents requirements in terms of data residency and latency.

DRCC expands the public OCI offers, enabling customers to build and operate modern applications inside their data center at the same price offered in Oracle’s public cloud.

More details about DRCC are available at the follwing Oracle corporate link.


My OOW18 Summary

 

For those who are interested here my major takeaways from the OOW18

 

As we all know, since few years the HOTTEST topic advertized at the OOW is “Cloud Computing”, but this time Oracle Cloud was no longer alone!

In fact the focus was divided between the new Oracle OCI Cloud, also named by Larry as Second Generation of Cloud and the Autonomous Database.

 

OCI Second Gen of Cloud

Here a summary of the major advantages compared to the previous version:

– Security, guaranteed by robots which scan the network for any malicious attack.  

– The cutting edge virtual network, which brings up to 50GB speed and extreme flexibility.

– Bare Metal Infrastructure based on Exadata Machines.

– Aggressive pricing, compared to the competitors.

 

Autonomous Database.

The Autonomous Database option is now available for OLTP and DWH databases and includes new capabilities like automatic index creation and column stored table conversion. In version 19 it will manage online memory increase and additional tuning options.

As announces during Larry’s keynote, the  Autonomous database will be also available with the Cloud @ Customer option (on Exadata only), ant it will no longer require human labor (DBA and Sys Admin intervention), because Self Provisioning, Self Driving, Self Tuning and Self Repairing.

For non-technical people it looks magic, but it is few steps from what we already use in a standard Oracle 12c Database. In fact Autonomous Database leverages a bunch of database advisors and tuning options, now orchestrated by an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning software, in order to provide data-driven predictions and decisions.

Over the next few years, Autonomous Database will be enriched with several new options, improving the quality of live of many DBAs, which will be relieved of the majority of the tedious and recurring tasks, leaving the most added value tasks under their own responsibility.

Last but not least, the Autonomous Database runs in a very high end configurations (Oracle guarantees 99,995% of availability), which is quite expensive to acquire due to the list of mandatory requirements: Exadata, RAC, Active DG, Multitenant, Tuning Pack, Diagnostic Pack etc..

 

Exadata Machine

Several interesting features are coming next year with the introduction of the INTEL Optane DC Persistent Memory for even faster OLTP.

This new type of memory will be installed on the Storage Cell and used as accelerator in front of Flash memory.

The database node will  access to the Persistent Memory via RDMA with a gain up to 20 x faster access latency.

Oracle is developing the more and more Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) instructions for Cache Fusion and Storage Cell operations in order to offload the database nodes and increase the overall performance.

Stay tuned on Exadata Machine because the next generation will also include BIG architectural change…

 

Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM)

One curiosity directly collected at Linux Virtualization booth is that even though the next generation of hypervisor will be based on KVM, Oracle will keep calling it OVM and of course the current OVM product based on XEN (OVS, OVM) will still be in use by many companies.

How possibly the customers can get confused ?!?

 

With this I finished, although there would be much more to write.