Oracle databases and the Cloud – is that possible?

In this article you will read

• how to operate existing Oracle databases in the cloud,
• how you can optimize license costs and eliminate latency problems,
• and how you can test the offer as an early bird.

Oracle databases have established themselves as an important part of corporate IT in many companies. However, they often prove to be a challenge in the course of cloud transformation – both technically and financially. With Oracle-optimized, the Open Telekom Cloud now provides a solution.

Oracle databases have conquered their place in the spotlight and have retained it even in the age of the cloud. This is confirmed by the DB Engines Ranking and the Red9 Ranking.

The reasons for this are easy to find. Oracle has become a gold standard in enterprise IT over the last few decades. Companies in a wide range of industries that want to run critical applications with high performance and high availability rely on Oracle databases. These performance factors also including scalability, reliability, security and comprehensive functionality speak for Oracle. But performance comes at a price. Oracle databases are among the most expensive database solutions on the market. In addition, Oracle did not adapt its license/usage models to the cloud world for a long time, which sometimes led to dramatically rising costs.

This situation has put IT managers of large companies in a difficult position. Oracle databases are and will presumably remain an integral part of critical application landscapes. They still manage a significant proportion of sensitive and vital company data. However, these legacy landscapes should also be migrated as part of the cloud transformation. At the very least the databases must also be made available for new cloud-native services.  

The logical consequence is hybrid landscapes, which increase the IT management effort and complexity of enterprise IT. Hybrid landscapes, in which databases are located on-premises and applications are provided from the cloud, also create challenges at the operational level. Latencies occur when the database and application interact, which reduce the processing speed and worsen the user experience. As a result, landscapes with Oracle databases lose one of their key advantages. What can be done?

Latencies can be minimized if Oracle databases are operated in the local vicinity of the cloud resources. The Open Telekom Cloud has taken up this idea and set up two Oracle PCA instances (Private Cloud Appliance™) in the Magdeburg and Biere data centers. They provide an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that is integrated into the Open Telekom Cloud. Users access it via their virtual private cloud instance (VPC) and can thus implement high availability (HA) scenarios. 

This offer is currently accessible as an Early Bird via the contact form on the website. Those who are interested can contact the team to try out the service and address their own requests for flavors. There are currently eleven different flavors from 4 vCPU with 16 GB RAM up to 16 vCPU with 256 GB RAM to choose from. The service will be available on the Open Telekom Cloud from July onwards.

With Oracle-optimized, the Open Telekom Cloud now closes a gap and connects the most common databases to the cloud (Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, NoSQL, Cassandra). Oracle-optimized offers highly-available, on-demand Oracle database operations from the cloud and can be terminated on a monthly basis. The service is primarily aimed at operators of on-premises installations of Oracle databases (with their own licenses), who can take the technology to the cloud as part of their cloud transformation without any compromises. In addition, the use of Oracle hardware significantly reduces the license costs for database deployment: only one Oracle license is required for every four vCPUs.