Oracle has launched a set of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) systems that companies can run in-house and pay for on a monthly basis, a project the company announced at OpenWorld in September.
Oracle is not pitching the IaaS offers as an alternative to commodity cloud services, such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS), but rather as an alternative to purchasing Oracle systems for on premise deployment.
Using Oracle IaaS, the company claims, eliminates the upfront capital costs of buying new equipment, and could quickly provide additional capacity, at a price, when needed.
With Oracle IaaS, customers can lease versions of many of Oracle’s integrated systems, including versions of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.
In a data sheet on the company’s Web site, Oracle explained that the IaaS service could be less expensive than purchasing an Oracle system, such as an Exadata X3-2 Engineered System, if no additional capacity-on-demand (CoD) is used. Purchasing an Exadata system would cost over US$1,360,000 over three years, though an identical Oracle IaaS setup would cost only $1,080,000 over that same time, with no CoD.
The IaaS option offers some additional benefits as well, Oracle claims. Customers pay on a month-by-month basis, rather than pay an upfront lump sum. An extra high availability option keeps additional CoD cores on demand that can be spun up at no additional usage charge, should one or a number of the primary nodes stop working. Overall, Oracle will keep on hand one additional standby node for every three nodes in use. Oracle will also periodically upgrade the hardware at no cost.
The minimum contract for an IaaS on-premise service is for three years, and billing is done on a monthly cycle.
