Oracle adds AI and bare metal to UK cloud region

Oracle has built out its UK cloud offering with the addition of several new services to its local region.

Those include Oracle's autonomous database, Exadata, AI and blockchain, which are all now available from its UK data centres, meaning organisations that store their data locally can now leverage these capabilities.

They can also take advantage of Oracle's bare metal cloud based on its new X7 server, and block storage, both designed for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Claiming the UK-hosted services benefit from "extremely low latency and high bandwidth", James Stanbridge, VP and lead product manager for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Europe and Asia, said: "It's a very significant new region and what Oracle is doing and our strategy has been over many years now is to build new regions and cloud capabilities exactly where and when customers need them to meet their growing needs to complete their transformation to the cloud."

Oracle touted customers like Bristol startup YellowDog, which specialises in processing HPC workloads, and the National Grid, to show its cloud is attracting users both big and small.

"The goal National Grid has is a complete IT transformation from on-premise to a cloud-first strategy - that's by no means unusual [among our customers]," Stanbridge told Cloud Pro.

"These IT transformation projects have long lead times on them, much more like six to nine-month projects. I'm seeing that in data centre regions in the EU. We are starting to see some of those large IT transformations move in [to the UK region]."

Oracle's new additions to its UK region come as part of a new push to expand its global data centre footprint, opening 12 new regions of three or more facilities across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

It added new UK facilities in the first half of 2017, alongside an expansion in Turkey and the US. Oracle spent just $1.7 billion on new cloud regions in 2016, compared to $31 billion by rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google. CEO Mark Hurd defended his company's outlay by saying that Oracle's fast hardware meant it could provide fewer facilities.