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Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure Unleashed
Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure prioritizes lowering costs, enabling customers to run a variety of distributed workloads, including agentic AI, analytics, and transactional application.
Key Highlights:
- Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure service provides a globally distributed, mission-critical database that automatically manages and synchronizes data across multiple cloud regions.
- It uses an intelligent, serverless architecture that dynamically scales to handle agentic AI and other demanding workloads, while also ensuring high availability and zero data loss.
- The platform helps businesses meet strict data residency and compliance requirements by automating data distribution and storage based on location.
- Its consumption-based model and lack of dedicated hardware significantly reduce upfront costs, making high-end Exadata performance accessible to organizations of all sizes.
- The solution offers a unique competitive advantage with its tightly integrated hardware and software, leading to competitively advantageous performance and efficiency compared to generic cloud infrastructures.
The News
Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure, designed to simplify the deployment of distributed mission-critical applications across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions worldwide. This new service automatically distributes, stores, and synchronizes data across multiple locations, enabling applications to remain online even during regional outages and helping businesses meet data residency requirements. For more information, read the Oracle press release.
Analyst Take
Oracle has released the Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure, a new service for deploying mission-critical applications across its global cloud regions. This service automatically manages and synchronizes data across multiple locations, ensuring applications stay online during regional outages and helping businesses comply with data residency laws.
With a flexible, serverless architecture, the service can scale up or down automatically to handle changing workloads, all without complex setup. From my viewpoint, this can give customers with real-time analytics, high-volume transactions, and variable agentic AI tasks the benefits of an always-on system, lower costs, and simplified operations, enabling them to expand globally with confidence.
Directly Meeting the Workload Demands of the Agentic AI Era
The Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure is designed to meet the demanding needs of agentic AI workloads, providing a powerful combination of high performance and mission-critical reliability. The solution's elastic scalability allows customers to handle large volumes of data and execute vector searches across massive datasets with speed and efficiency. Its fault-tolerant architecture and Raft replication ensure always-on operations and fast, zero-data-loss failover, protecting applications even during data center or regional outages.
Furthermore, I see that the platform helps customers address key challenges related to data residency and cost. It provides easy-to-use, automated data distribution methods that allow businesses to store, access, and process AI vectors and other data across different locations, helping them meet global data residency requirements. The hyperscale, serverless architecture offers exceptional cost-efficiency, as it can dynamically scale up or down based on fluctuating demand from AI workloads. This ensures that customers only pay for the resources they need, simplifying operations and providing a flexible, cost-effective solution for a wide range of use cases.
Delivering An Enduring Data Architectural Edge to Customers
From my perspective, the Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure is built on a unique data architecture that offers several key advantages for demanding workloads. To ensure extreme availability, the system uses an Active/Active/Active architecture with Raft replication across multiple data centers. This configuration is essential for mission-critical applications like payment processing and stock trading, where downtime is not an option. The platform makes it possible for customers of all sizes to meet their diverse needs at a low cost, thanks to its serverless architecture.
The platform also helps customers with data residency requirements, using automated policies to place data in specific global data centers. This is crucial for highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare. By storing data in OCI data centers closest to the end-user, it also significantly improves responsiveness and user satisfaction for applications in sectors like entertainment, retail, and telecommunications.
The solution is also engineered for high-performance AI and analytics. It enables customers to run petabyte-scale AI and analytics workloads on real-time streaming data, with the ability to horizontally scale and process millions of records per second. This is especially vital for data-intensive industries such as manufacturing and utilities. Additionally, the architecture supports hyperscale OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), capable of handling millions of transactions per second with petabyte-scale data. This level of performance and elastic capacity is critical for modern applications such as agentic AI, real-time image recognition, and online marketing.
Building AI That Works Everywhere, For Everyone
The Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure gives users access to a comprehensive and competitively advantageous suite of automated data distribution policies and replication methods. This allows organizations to precisely match distribution methods to application needs, ensuring optimal performance, low latency, and data sovereignty. At the same time, the solution maintains all of the full Oracle Database's capabilities, including SQL, data consistency, advanced security, and powerful features like AI Vector Search.
The platform is built for always-on operations, using built-in Raft-based replication for automatic failover with zero data loss across nodes, regions, and even different clouds. This level of reliability is crucial for mission-critical applications. Additionally, it helps customers meet data residency and regulatory compliance by automatically storing country-specific data within mandated regions, all while providing a unified, single view of the database for operational use.
I find that the solution delivers significant operational and administrative benefits. It enables organizations to eliminate complex ETL processes by using space-efficient, intelligent database clones, which is well suited for dev/test environments and enables zero-ETL analytics. For administrators, distributed databases are managed as a single logical unit, providing operational simplicity at a global scale. This means monitoring, managing, and backing up a globally distributed database is as straightforward as managing a single instance.
Crucially, the solution offers application transparency, allowing existing in-house and packaged Oracle applications to use the new infrastructure without any code changes. This makes it simple for organizations to modernize their database environment and immediately realize the benefits of high availability, superior performance, and data residency.
I discern that Exascale Infrastructure simplifies database deployment by providing a fully managed, cloud-native solution that requires no dedicated hardware. This service, globally distributed across OCI, enables organizations to deploy powerful databases at a lower cost. The intelligent architecture of Exascale's storage offloads AI and SQL operations from database servers, ensuring exceptional performance and incredibly low-latency data input/output, similar to what customers expect from Exadata. All of this is made simple through cloud automation, which handles tasks like provisioning, patching, backups, and disaster recovery through the OCI console or APIs.
With Exascale's intelligent data architecture, organizations of any size can scale intelligently and only pay for what they use. Customers can start small and then independently scale their compute and storage resources up or down without any downtime or performance issues. This flexibility enables them to flexibly handle fluctuating demands, such as seasonal spikes, by instantly scaling compute without the rebalancing or data movement that's typically required with distributed databases. This consumption-based model ensures that organizations are only billed for the resources they actually consume.
Since it has no dedicated hardware or capital investment requirements, Exascale Infrastructure's elastic model significantly reduces upfront costs. It enables customers to add compute and storage resources as needed while still providing enterprise-grade performance. This model uses a straightforward pricing structure based on the number and shape of shards (VMs, ECPUs) and the storage resources provisioned. This approach offers thorough cost visibility according to customer local or global scaling requirements, so there are no hidden fees or unexpected charges.
Fulfilling Real-World Requirements and Applications
These capabilities provide concrete solutions for industries that demand global reach, data residency compliance, performance, and high availability. For financial services, Exascale Infrastructure helps organizations adhere to strict data residency laws while delivering the performance necessary for real-time transactions, fraud detection, and risk analysis in various markets. The platform also supports e-commerce, enabling active-active distributed applications across regions to ensure consistent performance and always-on availability for a global user base. This allows businesses to seamlessly scale to handle petabytes of data and millions of transactions per second by independently adjusting compute and storage.
The technology is also being leveraged to power Agentic AI workloads that require high-throughput, mission-critical databases with extreme performance, petabyte scalability, and constant availability. The platform addresses data residency concerns and accelerates inferencing and decision-making by offloading complex queries to intelligent storage with AI Smart Scan. Additionally, it helps organizations handle the immense data from IoT devices, allowing them to ingest and process massive amounts of sensor data across multiple regions to gain real-time insights. For petabyte-scale analytics, Exascale's intelligent storage uses Exadata Smart Scan to run large-scale, multi-model analytical workloads efficiently.
Delivering A Multitude of Competitive Advantages
I find that Oracle's Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure provides a unique set of competitive advantages primarily stemming from its deep integration of an agile intelligent data architecture with a highly elastic, cloud-native model. Unlike competitors' solutions that often rely on commodity hardware and a more traditional separation of compute and storage, Exascale uses a database-aware architecture. This means the intelligent storage offloads AI and SQL operations from the database servers, leading to significantly faster query performance and lower latency.
For example, Oracle can assert a 50x performance advantage and 17 microsecond latency over comparable services from AWS or Azure. This is achieved through capabilities such as AI Smart Scan and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), which directly move data between storage and memory, bypassing traditional bottlenecks. This tight integration of hardware and software, a hallmark of the Exadata engineered systems, provides a level of performance and efficiency that is difficult for competitors to match with a generic cloud infrastructure.
This platform provides three replication methods, including Raft-based replication, to ensure databases are always available. It also offers six methods for data distribution, allowing applications to optimally place data for low latency and regulatory compliance - a significant advantage over vendors that might only offer a single option. A key benefit of this new service is its low-cost entry point, which makes high-end Exascale technology accessible and attractive to smaller organizations.
Moreover, Exascale Infrastructure democratizes access to this high-end Exadata performance. Historically, Exadata was associated with a high minimum cost and dedicated hardware, making it prohibitive for smaller organizations or smaller workloads. Exascale, with its multi-tenant, pay-per-use, and serverless architecture, changes this by dramatically lowering the cost of entry. Customers can start with a small number of cores and a minimal amount of storage and scale up or down independently and instantly without downtime or data rebalancing.
This elastic, consumption-based model, combined with the full feature set of Oracle Database, including advanced capabilities like AI Vector Search and Raft replication for zero data loss, makes the solution both highly cost-effective and enterprise-grade. This flexibility and affordability, combined with its ability to meet stringent data residency and sovereignty requirements through its globally distributed nature, positions Exascale as a compelling option for a wide range of organizations, from startups to large enterprises.
Looking Ahead
Overall, I believe that Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure brings advanced technologies to the distributed database market that are certain to upend the competition. This includes three replication methods, including Raft-based replication, designed to meet the requirements for always-on databases. For data distribution, Oracle offers six methods, enabling apps to optimally collocate data for low latency, regulatory compliance, and other specific needs. In contrast, some other vendors only support only one. In this new offering, the icing on the cake is Exascale providing a low-cost entry point which should be attractive to smaller organizations. Clearly, only Oracle has the combination of proven technologies to deliver an enterprise-class distributed database - and as a result, Oracle continues to leave the competition behind.
Organizations often find it challenging to deploy and manage distributed databases because of the high cost and complexity of operating many servers across different regions. Oracle’s Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure solves this with a serverless architecture, making it possible for customers of all sizes to meet their diverse needs at a low cost. This new offering effectively makes a mission-critical distributed database accessible to a much broader audience.
Ron Westfall | Analyst In Residence
Ron Westfall is a prominent analyst figure in technology and business transformation. Recognized as a Top 20 Analyst by AR Insights and a Tech Target contributor, his insights are featured in major media such as CNBC, Schwab Network, and NMG Media.
His expertise covers transformative fields such as Hybrid Cloud, AI Networking, Security Infrastructure, Edge Cloud Computing, Wireline/Wireless Connectivity, and 5G-IoT. Ron bridges the gap between C-suite strategic goals and the practical needs of end users and partners, driving technology ROI for leading organizations.