Navigating Disaster Recovery with Equinix and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Public cloud consumption has been growing rapidly across Asia-Pacific in recent years as indicated by the uptake in secure, private connectivity to cloud services. The Cloud & IT services industry segment is forecast to see the largest Interconnection bandwidth growth in Asia-Pacific and also globally at a 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) according to the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Volume 3, a market study released by Equinix.

Oracle is one of the leading hyperscale cloud providers already benefiting in Asia-Pacific from the overall global trend, as shown in the rapid expansion of Oracle’s complete cloud services including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions. Oracle’s strategic focus on cloud consistency, delivering identical and compatible technologies for on-premise private and the public cloud offerings in a cohesive hybrid platform is already paying off with Enterprise customers. Digital Transformation is taking place at a different pace in each customer environment; hence the flexible choice of private and public cloud components makes multi-year transformation initiatives easier to plan and architect.

As a typical first step in a cloud transition journey, hybrid Oracle environments allow customers to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a disaster recovery target for their on-premise or colocated production environments, as demonstrated by HAVI, a food supply chain and logistics company implementing their disaster recovery strategy with Equinix and Oracle.

However, for businesses going all-in with public clouds, ensuring continuity can be a headache. To achieve this, enterprises need to mirror business critical workloads across fully independent cloud zones, but these zones need to be located in the same country to meet data sovereignty requirements. This is ultimately putting pressure on enterprises to build out well-architected DR plans to ensure applications can recover as quickly as possible and continue to provide seamless services to end users.

In order to address the above data residency requirements, Oracle has recently expanded the options to architect effective geo-redundant cloud solutions by announcing five new cloud regions worldwide. These new regions are additional second sites within the same countries globally, including new cloud deployments in Asia-Pacific in Melbourne, Australia and Osaka, Japan.

Protecting your critical infrastructure

According to a study conducted by the Uptime Institute, the cost of unplanned outages has risen to US$8,851 per minute. These outages not only impact the ability for enterprise to deliver services to their users, but also have the potential to damage a business’s reputation in the long-term. From network outages to equipment failures to natural disasters, disaster recovery (DR) is the key to maintaining business continuity, particularly in times of uncertainty.

Cloud connectivity through private interconnection is also becoming more critical than ever, with new technologies like 5G and Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) implemented rapidly as businesses face both micro and macro uncertainty. As the world becomes increasingly connected, it also puts pressure on systems to ensure they can keep running in the face of disaster or outages.

Resiliency is as important as agility in a digital intensive economy and for digital transformation to be truly successful in Asia-Pacific it will require secure, private and resilient connectivity, with reliable disaster recovery options.

In view of this growing need and complexity, Equinix recently announced the expansion of its dedicated, private access to the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Melbourne and Osaka cloud regions from our International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers to increase the resiliency of Oracle Cloud in the Australia and Japan markets.

This expansion is supported by new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect edge locations deployed at Equinix, providing secure, private connectivity via Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric). OCI FastConnect delivers a secure and dedicated connection between customer data centers and Oracle Cloud. With OCI FastConnect via ECX Fabric, enterprises can migrate and run compute, applications and data workloads to Oracle Cloud in a high-throughput, scalable manner that reduces costs and delivers consistent and predictable performance.

These new locations enable highly geo-redundant private connectivity for business critical enterprise workloads via the Sydney and Melbourne Oracle Cloud data regions in Australia, and the independent Tokyo and Osaka regions in Japan. Utilizing the dual independent OCI FastConnect locations in-country, customers can still use secure, private, high throughput connections to the Oracle Cloud in the event of a large scale metropolitan area site failure – as opposed to failing over to less secure public internet connectivity with unpredictable latency in an unpredictable disaster event.

Oracle customers in other parts of the globe have already been deploying similar geo-redundant Oracle Cloud solutions: the global minerals and logistics company US Silica migrated their Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning system to an Oracle hybrid environment with Equinix.  These highly resilient Oracle Cloud design options are now available for businesses in the Asia-Pacific region alongside the recent expansions of Oracle Cloud and OCI FastConnect at Equinix.

The Melbourne and Osaka FastConnect services can also be accessed from 45+ Global ECX Fabric locations via elastic, on-demand software defined Remote Connections. This allows businesses to privately and securely connect to their digital destinations on Platform Equinix, where enterprises have access to over 2,900 cloud and IT service providers globally.

Powering your network with unparalleled connectivity

In an era of digital transformation, businesses need far more than security. The ability to deliver a smooth and uninterrupted experience is critical. A distributed, hybrid and multi cloud approach can enable enterprises to securely connect and back up data between multiple sites. Equinix, the leading interconnection and data center provider, offers the benefits of speed, scalability, and optimized network topology, as well as a choice of mix-and-match connectivity models to fit changing consumption and service needs.

OCI FastConnect provides a secure, private failover option in case of a disaster, to protect business critical workloads from failure. By leveraging Equinix’s unique cloud edge node locations to provide the lowest possible latency, FastConnect is able to provide a high-bandwidth, reliable and consistent networking experience when compared to internet-based connections. The cloud adjacent placement of Oracle on-premise workloads at Equinix locations also provides similar geo-redundancy for Oracle hybrid cloud configurations, such as Exadata Database Machine X8-2 or Exadata Cloud, using local Oracle FastConnect on ECX Fabric in each of the Equinix data centers locally.

Preparing for uncertainty

It is likely that 2020 will continue to be a year of uncertainty, but ensuring your business critical infrastructure is resilient is one of the best ways to prepare.