Alan Zeichick, Director of Strategic Communications for Oracle, wrote in Forbes about Oracle’s expansion of its global data center footprint and the Cloud regions that Oracle has been opening worldwide.

Where Are the New Oracle Data Centers?

Many organizations believe that the best Cloud is a local Cloud, and that is one of the major reasons behind Oracle’s decision to open Cloud regions worldwide. In the past few weeks alone, Oracle has announced new facilities in:

• Sydney, Australia
• São Paolo, Brazil
• Mumbai, India
• Zurich, Switzerland

Earlier this year, Oracle also opened data centers in Toronto, Tokyo, and Seoul.

What Is A Data Center?

Oracle describes each location as a “Cloud region,” which refers to one or more availability domains in a geographic area. Each domain contains an independent data center, based on the second-generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with its own power, cooling, and network, linked together with low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects.

Why Is Oracle Expanding Its Global Data Center Footprint?

Andrew Reichman, Director of Product Management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, explained that there are two main reasons behind Oracle’s expansion of its number of global Cloud regions:

1. A local data center can boost raw performance for some applications
2. Customer preference to keep their data in-region

In terms of performance, the shorter the distance between the provider’s Cloud data center and the customer’s organization means the lower the latency and the better the user experience for some applications – especially those that require many back-and-forth trips in order to complete a specific task.

“You may have an application that’s transacting very large volumes to and from the cloud all day for many users. That data has to traverse between where these users are, where the data is created, and where the data gets processed. The user experience of that application might suffer if there’s too much delay between each handoff.”

—Andrew Reichman, Director of Product Management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Adjacency to related systems is important, especially in hybrid Cloud deployments, where data is generated, stored, and processed in both Cloud and on-premises data centers. For the best application performance and user experience, the customer might prefer a Cloud data region close to its on-premises data center.

Another related reason Oracle is rolling out more data centers worldwide is to serve existing customers.

“When you look at Japan or Korea or Australia, Oracle serves the majority of the biggest companies in those places already. We want to be close to them, so that we can satisfy the latency issues and be able to run the most critical systems for those companies in our Cloud.”

—Andrew Reichman, Director of Product Management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

With its expansion, Oracle will have a Cloud region local to the majority of its customer base. Nearly every one of the top 40 companies in Switzerland use Oracle software, and 22 of them already used Oracle Cloud in some way even before the provider opened the local cloud region.

Generation 2 Cloud in Oracle Data Centers

All of the data centers in Oracle’s new cloud regions use the latest Generation 2 Cloud technology, which includes high-performance servers, low-latency networks, and strong security, backed by business-class service-level agreements. The performance of those Cloud systems is predictable, consistent, and non-variable because Oracle doesn’t oversubscribe its systems. One
Cloud customer’s busy usage won’t slow down another customer’s workloads.

These Gen 2 data centers were designed from the ground up to support cloud services such as Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Real Application Clusters.

“We’ve created an automated delivery process for these regions, which allows us to build so many so quickly. We really studied the experience of building our first regions and scripted everything to speed things up and eliminate any glitches.”

—Andrew Reichman, Director of Product Management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure