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back to article Oracle plans Exadata-as-a-service, in cloud or on-prem

Oracle is preparing an on-premises version of its new Exadata cloud service. Big Red recently introduced a cloudy version of Exadata, its dedicated database appliance which itself scored a new release. The headline items in the seventh-generation appliance are the new Broadwell Xeons. Oracle's chosen the 22-core version to …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It seems that half the point of cloud is to get away from the high costs of on prem proprietary appliances, such as Exadata, with less costly hardware configurations. Also, why would anyone care what sort of hardware your DB is running on in the cloud? The idea is that the cloud provider has service levels they must provide, how they provide them is their business. You get to not care about infrastructure. This must be an Oracle ploy to try to get people to pay a huge premium for their cloud service. It would be interesting to see the costs of running an Oracle DB on their Exadata cloud vs AWS and Azure. It also seems that Oracle is just putting themselves at a huge disadvantage to MSFT in the move to cloud. MSFT is now giving away SQL licenses for free to any Oracle customer and heavily incentivizing people to run that SQL on Azure. Oracle's counter story is going to be "well the bad news is the Oracle support is more costly than MSFT, but, if you look at the total transformational picture, Oracle DB on the cloud will be much more costly than SQL on the cloud." That isn't a winner.

    0 2 Reply
    1. Adam 52 Silver badge
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      There aren't many Exadata competitors in "the cloud". Neither AWS nor Azure supports SSAS "as a service" so you're left running it on VMs.

      If Oracle get this right then it's a way of saving on those expensive Oracle consultants needed to keep an Oracle install working.

      2 0 Reply
    2. hmas
      Reply Icon

      Not sure why you've posted anonymously, but anyway your assumption is wrong.

      The hardware is only half of the Exadata 'Value Proposition'. It includes a slew of proprietary software features (compression, database aware storage, etc...) that not only gives Oracle an advantage over comparable solutions, but also pretty much guarantees vendor lock in. The traditional IT costs (HW, SW and support) of exadata are significant and the different price points make the jump in cost from, say half to full rack.

      So, Exadata in the cloud makes a lot of sense for Oracle and some sense for some customers. But it is definitely a case of caveat emptor. Once you have gone down the Exadata route the transitional back to even traditional Oracle Enterprise Database is a hard one, let alone porting your app to MS SQL, Postgres, etc...

      1 1 Reply
      1. Mad Mike
        Reply Icon

        Value proposition

        As you rightly point out, the 'value proposition' from Oracle is only from their point of view, not yours. Once you've locked yourself into their ecosystem, you can bet the costs will simply climb and climb. As long as they don't raise them so far it is cost effective to move elsewhere, they can raise them to their hearts desire. A win from their point of view. What about the customers? The same is true of Oracle enterprise agreements as well. It's all about lockin and in reality, nothing at all with customer value.

        0 1 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        " It includes a slew of proprietary software features (compression, database aware storage, etc...) "

        The cloud providers can do the same by just scaling out white box x86 and throwing some Flash cards in the servers. There is nothing magical about Exadata. It is fast because it uses Flash and Infiniband and it compresses. You can do that without Exadata. The reliability benefits are just the standard RAC/DG story. Available without Exadata... and RAC is legacy anyway, shared storage clustering. Cloud providers can do better than RAC.... The real value of Exadata is that scale out white box is complex, Exadata is an appliance. With cloud, you can offload that complexity.

        0 4 Reply
        1. Billl
          Reply Icon

          to AC

          "The cloud providers can do the same by just scaling out white box x86 and throwing some Flash cards in the servers."

          Fairly naive nonsense. If that were true then someone would have done it by now. No one has done it.

          Sure, for OLTP, you can get pretty close, but without the reliability/availability required by large customers. As far as DWH's, noone even comes close to the performance of Exadata, at the scale that Exadata provides you. Sure, on smaller environments, less than a few TB of data, you can get close, but that's not much of a DWH these days.

          Oracle sells to large enterprises that need performance and scale. I think Oracle will do very well with this service, as no one else can do what they do at this time. No, not MySQL, nor Postgres, nor Hana, nor...

          2 0 Reply
      3. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        "Advantages" to whom?

        And what, exactly are those advantages, other than perhaps faster performance, to the customer? The advantage is to ORCL here, as they try to stem the exodus of their installed base to cheaper, just-as-good Open Source alternatives like Mongo, Redis, and AWS' offerings.

        52% of ORCL's revenue comes from maintenance on their on-prem Database & Apps, read the link below to an investor's note from a couple days ago. That revenue stream is @ 90+% margins, and in decline, while moving customers to "Cloud" costs them more and makes them less, but they have no choice.

        Just as the 1st Anon Coward pointed out, putting your "Oracle Cloud" on Exadata on-prem is essentially what the customer has been running the past 30 years anyway. It just moves ORCL from an on-prem SW model and maintenance stream to a SWaaS / IaaS subscription model.

        http://seekingalpha.com/article/3965635-oracle-might-eating-porridge

        0 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      "...Also, why would anyone care what sort of hardware your DB is running on in the cloud?.."

      For the companies that can afford this kind of kit, they'll have deep enough pockets for this to be an option. However, there are other concerns other than operational costs to contend with, such as latency & bandwidth and flexibility to migrate/re-deploy/delete data without being beholden to another vendors Ts & Cs.

      You know, the one where they say that you indemnify them against all losses etc nevermind the risks undertake when AWS etc has an outage.

      0 0 Reply
    4. TheVogon
      Reply Icon

      "MSFT is now giving away SQL licenses for free to any Oracle customer "

      But you have to agree to pay maintenance so it's not entirely free. So Microsoft is getting an on-going revenue stream...

      1 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        "But you have to agree to pay maintenance so it's not entirely free. So Microsoft is getting an on-going revenue stream..."

        True, but MSFT support is still less costly than Oracle support. It isn't totally free, but it is less costly than Oracle.

        1 1 Reply
  2. BurnT'offering

    This seems like having a lodger

    who charges YOU rent. I'm sure it makes perfect sense, if you are an Oracle salesperson

    0 0 Reply
  3. Mad Mike

    Whose best interests?

    Whenever dealing with any suppliers, always bear in mind they're looking for two things. Firstly, make the most money out of you as possible, as quickly as possible. Preferably in next quarter or half year. After all, bonuses must be paid and results must look good. Secondly, maintain the income stream for as long as possible onwards, preferably with as little effort as possible. Essentially, this means tie in. Ensure the customer is locked into something they either can't get out of, or will cost an awful lot to do so. Not all suppliers operate like this, but a lot do and the remainder are heading in this direction. Of course, as usual, Oracle are amongst the worst.

    So, if you're a customer, never believe anything a salesman says, always get everything independently checked and above all else, believe your staff ahead of them (sadly missing in many places these days).

    0 0 Reply

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