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Software giant Oracle has made a series of announcements at its Oracle CloudWorld event in New York, with the standout being the launch of three new cloud regions including the UK.
The new regions, in Virginia, London, and Turkey to be more precise, are expected to go live by the middle of 2017, while the company adds it expects further regions, in APAC, the Middle East, and North America, to be launched a year later.
Oracle adds that the new regions will comprise at least three high bandwidth, low latency sites – for which the company code is ‘availability domains’ – located several miles from each other and designed to be built to avoid failover.
Back in September, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison spoke of these fledgling next-generation data centres to delegates at their OpenWorld event. “We have a modern architecture for infrastructure where there’s no single point of failure,” he said. “Faults are isolated, therefore faults are tolerated. If we lose the data centre, then you won’t even know about it.” At the time, Ellison told delegates that “Amazon’s lead is over” in infrastructure as a service.
“Oracle is committed to building the most differentiated cloud platform that delivers on the requirements of a wide array of customer workloads,” said Deepak Patil, vice president of development at Oracle Cloud Platform in a statement. “This regional expansion underscores our commitment to making the engineering and capital investments required to continue to be a global large scale cloud platform leader.”
Elsewhere, the company announced expansions of Oracle Cloud Platform with what was described as an industry first. The Oracle Database Cloud Service is now available on bare metal compute, as well as new virtual machine, compute, load balancing, and storage capabilities for the platform. Oracle says its Database Cloud Service is perfect for development, testing, and deployment of enterprise workloads, while the advancements to the overall platform gives it ‘differentiated database performance at every scale, and deeply integrated IaaS capabilities for customers of any size’.
“These latest investments in the Oracle Cloud Platform provide a clear path to develop, test, and scale applications – with the Oracle Database or third-party databases,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development. “We offer customers the most comprehensive approach to moving to the cloud and accelerating their business strategies.”
In November, a study from Oracle argued various barriers remain for an enterprise IT cloud model to succeed, with proving return on investment and discord between infrastructures the key stumbling blocks.