The new service will be offered through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect and will help ensure the high performance and reliability of critical enterprise applications within Oracle’s cloud, which currently occupies more than 500,000 square feet across 16 Digital Realty locations.
Commenting on the news, Don Johnson, senior vice president of product development at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said: “Customers require seamless connectivity from their data centres and networks to Oracle Cloud for their most demanding workloads and applications. With Oracle’s FastConnect service via Digital Realty, customers can provision the dedicated and private connections they need today and easily scale with their growing business demands.”
Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Sean Iraca, VP of service enablement at Digital Realty explained why Oracle cloud was so crucial for its customers.
“Oracle is a very important cloud destination for our enterprises. They have a massive install base, so the ability to have them on our infrastructure globally and to be able to access them very seamlessly over our service exchange is really a lot of value to our customers.”
He went on to say that by adding Oracle cloud to Digital Realty exchanges, they are creating “more cloud destinations to our ecosystem. Its ability of our enterprise customers to access Oracle cloud services globally.”
And as ever Iraca says that the company is led by customer demand, saying: “We get the guidance for demand from our customer base, and Oracle especially in the last few years is really an important destination for a lot of our customers. We look at the market and think about how to keep on-boarding new hyperscalers and Oracle is a natural fit in that mix.”
By using Oracle FastConnect customers are able to set up a hybrid cloud as it offers an easy and cost-effective way to create fast, low-latency, private and dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud. In addition, Digital Realty’s service exchange gives enterprises private, secure, high-throughput, and low-latency access over a single interface to OCI and other cloud providers, overcoming some of the limitations and security issue associated with the public Internet. Users are able to manage physical and virtual connections through a single portal and gives them the visibility and reporting capabilities they need to address their connectivity requirements.
“Our direct connections to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure build upon our commitment to ensure that our customers have interconnected access to the critical IT resources they need to drive business success. The rapid growth of Oracle Cloud is a testament to its strength in the marketplace, and we are extremely pleased to be working closely with Oracle to accelerate its momentum,” added Chris Sharp, chief technology officer at Digital Realty.
But what makes Digital Realty different from Equinix, which recently added Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to 16 of its data centres across North America and Europe, well according to Iraca it’s because: “We serve different use cases. So if you’re looking for something where you need a large through-put, very low latency and you want to be able to build that into a facility that’s all autonomous and self-contained, you can do that here.”
As for security Iraca says that there are two aspects to the company’s approach.
“Our world is the physical world of highly secure facilities, and we house cloud services and providers within those facilities. From a security perspective I couldn’t even begin to list off the 100 or so certifications we have. What’s more interesting is what the drivers behind this need for public access. Certainly performance is a big driver, so the ability to get higher bandwidth and the economics that are part of it as well, but certainly security is at the top of that list. The ability to securely access their cloud environment and tie together their brick and mortar enterprise to their cloud services is a very important factor. So when we look at how we’ve deployed service exchange that’s really at the heart of that. How do we connect our customers to the facilities they need to without touching the big scary internet?”
As the company sees the New Year off with this news announcement, Iraca says there’s more to come in a quick as the next quarter or two.
“There will be announcements around density, hyperscalers and also around features and capabilities. A lot of it will be around private access but we’re actually adding in some new features that will extend the capabilities of this access substantially.”
