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Oracle announces general availability of Bare Metal Cloud Services

The next-generation IaaS offering is the key to Oracle's ambitions to take on Amazon Web Services.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Oracle on Thursday announced the general availability of its Bare Metal Cloud Services, which CTO Larry Ellison introduced last month at the OpenWorld conference. Ellison talked a big game at OpenWorld, declaring that with this next-generation Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Oracle could finally take on Amazon Web Services.

The offering is available now in a new US-Southwest region, with additional regions coming soon. The US-Southwest region consists of three fault-independent Availability Domains -- three physically separated datacenters that enable customers to build high-availability applications in the cloud.

Oracle's pitch is about both performance and cost. The high-scale public cloud offers bare metal compute in a fully virtualized, high-performance network environment. It also includes network block storage, object storage, identity and access management, VPN connectivity, and a software-defined Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). With elements of hardware and the cloud in its flexibility, Oracle says it should be a compelling offering for those running high-performance applications or sensitive applications that require isolation and control.

The bare metal cloud servers, Oracle says, are more than 11 times faster and 20-percent cheaper than the fastest solution offered by the competition. With compute priced by the hour and storage and networking by the month, Oracle makes it easy to understand the costs. Traffic within or between availability domains is free. Outbound bandwidth is only charged after the first 10TB.

Additionally, as Ellison said last month, the offering is convenient for customers transitioning into the cloud.

"Our new bare metal offering makes it possible for our customers to lift and shift their entire existing corporate infrastructure, data, and applications without any changes whatsoever and move it to the Oracle public cloud," he said. "You just can't do that with Amazon Web Service."

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