Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: The bare metal facts

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has become a strategically significant part of Oracle’s business, and one it hopes offers differentiation from the major hyperscalers. The company posted cloud infrastructure revenue of $4.9bn, up 84% from last year. It has also committed to spending $533bn to meet the compute requirements to fulfil customer contracts.

At the company’s recent Oracle AI Tour event in London, Computer Weekly met up with company representatives to discuss how its public cloud competes with the hyperscalers.

When asked about the main difference between Oracle’s approach and that of other cloud service providers (CSPs), Nathan Thomas, senior vice-president of product management for OCI, said: “We do delineate a little bit between OCI and other CSPs in that we’ve stayed reasonably focused in that core infrastructure space.”

He said OCI comprises around 150 web services available as public and private cloud offerings, and it has a global footprint spanning 200 regions. 

Oracle’s strategy is intentionally focused on IT infrastructure. “We don’t have some of the bloat – the niche, unprofitable services – that other CSPs carry around,” said Thomas. “We’ve taken a very firm approach to build the highest-performance, lowest-cost cloud that’s highly secure everywhere.”

The focus, he added, is to build the OCI IT environment with compute, networking and storage that “are highly tunable”, and that will remain “a major focus” for the company. 

Significantly, Thomas said that of the OCI customers requiring the highest level of performance, most are opting to buy “bare metal” hosting from Oracle. “When we look at our largest customers, they deploy bare metal with their own AI-driven software and platform management.”

When asked why these organisations are choosing bare metal over cloud-based IT infrastructure, Thomas spoke of the performance degradation and potential security risks inherent in server virtualisation compared to direct hardware access.

“We find that there is a bit of a tax that comes along with virtualisation, both in terms of efficiency of hardware, but also in terms of security, and the customers at the high end [of compute] are saying they would rather avoid that tax,” he said.

In his experience, some Oracle customers are more comfortable than they used to be in managing their own virtualisation as they grow their level of expertise. “A lot of the value that the clouds are bringing to bear in that space has been eroded by domain knowledge that’s growing from a customer perspective,” he said.

Thomas claimed that unlike rival cloud service providers, which he said use some level of virtualisation in their bare metal services to support storage and networking, Oracle’s is completely bare. This puts the onus on Oracle bare metal customers to deploy the entire IT environment the servers require.

“We do a huge amount of work on our root of trust concept [see box: What is Orace’s root of trust], where we validate the bare metal servers to ensure that they are secure for customers. This has been a huge investment for us. I don’t think we’ve seen anybody else quite follow the same pattern.”

Thomas said OCI is the only CSP where the bare metal offering is the company’s primary focus. “I think most other CSPs start the other way around, thinking about virtualisation first and then trying to bolt on bare metal. From an engineering capacity management perspective, we think about that bare metal every day,” he said.