Triggered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, facility lockdowns and the shift to remote working, companies in every industry around the globe turned to the cloud to scale their IT infrastructures and provide new approaches to deploy and access databases and applications. As businesses recover from the challenges of the pandemic and find their new normal, hybrid multicloud architectures have become increasingly prominent in their digital infrastructure strategies, according to the Equinix 2020-2021 Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS).
Equinix and Oracle are helping businesses simplify the complexity of migrating database and application workloads to hybrid multicloud architectures. With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and an Equinix Fabric™ software-defined interconnection to a choice of public cloud service providers (CSPs), Oracle customers can leverage a fully-managed hybrid cloud architecture for Oracle Autonomous Database or run traditional Oracle Database instances. This can all be done today as a pay-as-you-go subscription-based model with built-in security and delivered in a trusted and reliable Equinix IBX data center that provides high-speed on-ramps to a choice of CSPs around the world.
Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy with a Hybrid Cloud Database
With the rapid growth in edge compute and devices, IDC predicts that 80% of enterprises will run some level of data processing at the IoT edge. According to this IDC Infobrief, organizations will spend over US$6.2 billion on IoT edge Infrastructure by 2022. See how Equinix and Oracle provide a hybrid cloud database solution for better data management.
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The mass migration to hybrid and multicloud architectures
According to the GTTS, hybrid cloud is the most common deployment of cloud architectures globally between 2020 and 2021 used by 46% of IT professionals around the world — a 12-point increase from 2019-2020. And multicloud architectures rose from 17% to 28% — a 11-point increase.
GTTS survey responses to the question: “How are you deploying the cloud?”
With the vast majority of organizations (68%) moving more functions to the cloud, there is a greater demand for hybrid multicloud architectures among organizations of all sizes. This reflects more confidence in the cloud. However, IT organizations are still holding back on migrating databases and critical applications since that is proving to be more difficult than they expected—the GTTS reports that 47% of organizations’ databases and 63% of their business-critical applications are being kept on-premises.
Even when organizations have the tools to help with cloud migrations for applications and databases, many are still deferring the move of these mission-critical workloads to the cloud. With our alliance partner Oracle, we’ve seen a number of customers embracing hybrid cloud database deployments because they need to:
- Keep certain classes and types of data out of the public cloud due to industry data protection and regulatory data sovereignty compliance requirements.
- Achieve low-latency access from cloud-based applications, such as real-time data analytics and business intelligence, to their databases within an Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX)® data center.
- Access Oracle Database scalability and high-availability capabilities, such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), that are not available from non-Oracle cloud providers.
- Use an Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer platform to deliver higher performance and lower latency than is possible with typical cloud databases using a vendor-neutral digital infrastructure and interconnection platform such as Platform Equinix®.
Equinix and Oracle are helping businesses overcome hybrid multicloud challenges
Moving established transaction processing and analytical workloads to non-Oracle cloud providers has revealed some significant shortcomings with how those clouds run Oracle Databases and applications. Non-Oracle clouds impose limits on storage, capacity, IOPS, latency and throughput that are significantly worse compared to those offered by Exadata Cloud@Customer, while not providing crucial Oracle Database features such as Oracle RAC that enable high availability and scalable database compute capabilities. Further, many cloud providers will over-provision compute resources or provide licensing terms that do not scale effectively. As a result, customers either pay more for lower performance in the cloud or choose to continue to rely on their existing on-premises deployments.
Until now, there has not been a single platform provider that offers the type of IT consolidation, interconnection, security and management required for the migration of on-premises Oracle Database instances and applications to public cloud providers. Equinix and Oracle provide one smooth path to deploying these complex hybrid multicloud architectures.
Implement a true hybrid multicloud database solution with Oracle and Equinix
Equinix and Oracle are providing a hybrid multicloud database solution for customers seeking to operate their applications across one or more preferred cloud providers, allowing them to get the most out of their Oracle Database investment and realize their cloud strategy as quickly as possible. This is accomplished by operating the database on dedicated Exadata infrastructure within Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in proximity to the customer’s preferred public cloud provider. This benefits our joint customers by giving them the agility of cloud economics and the robust management features of Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, while leveraging dedicated, low-latency interconnection to their preferred CSP via Equinix Fabric™.
A hybrid cloud database implemented with Exadata technology on Platform Equinix enables IT organizations to take an interim step in their cloud migration journey. Whether they have deferred moving Oracle Database instances to the cloud due to design and architecture difficulties. Or they have performance and scalability issues and/or regulatory and compliance concerns, Equinix and Oracle have a solution.
As the world’s digital infrastructure company™, Equinix IBX data centers contain more than 40% of the private on-ramps to the top global CSPs. This enables our customers to implement the combined Oracle and Equinix hybrid multicloud solution over high-speed, low-latency connections in more markets and with greater options for secondary backup and disaster recovery locations.
Furthermore, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer enables organizations to get all the benefits of Exadata’s performance, scale and availability when consolidating their databases. These include the highest performing Oracle Database platform with up to 22 million IOPS, delivered as a cloud service on infrastructure dedicated exclusively to that customer and behind the customer’s firewall.
One use case is Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Equinix Fabric leveraging Oracle’s converged database for a multicloud strategy. Oracle Database is an excellent example of a converged database, as it provides support for multiple data types such as JSON, REST and Blockchain as part of the core database in addition to traditional relational database capabilities, at no additional cost. The same Exadata infrastructure offers the performance, flexibility and consolidation capabilities to support transactional applications running on one CSP and analytics applications running on a second CSP. This delivers the best performance for each application based on a CSP’s capabilities while maintaining the customer’s databases on a single high-performance platform with a secure, dedicated infrastructure.
Modern, hybrid multicloud architectures for today’s and tomorrow’s digital infrastructures
The accelerated digital transformation sparked by the global pandemic is fueling the need for on-demand access to cloud-based services. However, organizations still need fast and secure access to mission-critical Oracle databases on-premises in order to compete in today’s digital business environment. For these organizations, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer on Platform Equinix, with Equinix Fabric for cloud connectivity, is an ideal solution.
With this solution customers can now:
- Leverage investments in an existing database infrastructure, while more easily and quickly moving legacy applications and data to the cloud at their own pace.
- Maintain data security and compliance with a dedicated infrastructure such as Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer.
- Use Oracle Database features like RAC that are not available on other CSPs and achieve ideal performance in a cloud infrastructure optimized for Oracle databases.
- Access high-performance, secure and reliable on-ramps to a choice of preferred public cloud providers via Equinix Fabric, connecting databases and applications via low-latency software-defined interconnection in many global locations.
- Leverage the expertise of Equinix Solutions Architects to design and deploy agile, low-latency network topologies in IBX metro locations around the world.
With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Equinix Fabric, you can simplify migrating your Oracle Database and application workloads to hybrid multicloud architectures. Together Equinix and Oracle can help you reduce complexity, lower costs, ensure security and compliance, and deliver consistent and predictable performance.
To learn more about Read the IDC report, “Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy with a Hybrid Cloud Database.”
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