At launch, Oracle's Public Cloud services will be run from a single datacentre in Texas, potentially causing compliance concerns in the short term from customers outside the US
The Oracle Public Cloud will be run from a single Texas datacentre at launch, potentially hobbling service for non-US customers who need to conform to local data governance laws.
The recently introduced Oracle Public Cloud is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that works with applications written in
Java EE, and supports a social network and the company's suite of
Fusion applications. On Thursday, Oracle said it will wait before taking its cloud to datacentres outside the US.
"We're initially standing up a US datacentre, just a single one here," Tyler Jewell, head of product management and strategy for Oracle's cloud services, told ZDNet UK. "We're planning to go into Europe and Asia Pacific as soon as we make this revenue generating, [but] it may not be the exact duplicate environment."
Oracle will build the datacentres on a "per-region basis" so the cloud service can conform to local data legislation, Jewell said. He acknowledged that as the service will be US-only at launch, some businesses could be prevented from using it for reasons of compliance.
In the UK, a ruling by the High Court laid down that the country where a host server is located is the country where businesses will be held responsible for their internet-hosted material.
We're planning to go into Europe and Asia Pacific as soon as we make this revenue generating.
– Tyler Jewell, Oracle
In its unveiling of Public Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld, some of the company's slides described the service as having an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) component. However, Jewell said this was erroneous.
"It's really just a PaaS for now," he said. "We're not competing with Amazon, where they give you a [IaaS-like] computing environment."
Jewell could not give a launch date for Public Cloud, saying only that it should become available within the coming weeks or months. He was also unable to give specific details on pricing. "We see our price point as being equal to or cheaper than doing a completely open-source software stack on your own," he said.
Datacentre built on Oracle
The Austin, Texas-based datacentre that will support Oracle's cloud services has 100,000 square feet of IT floor space, 2,500 racks of equipment, over 15 petabytes of storage and consumes around 7.5MW of power.
Its infrastructure is mainly Oracle hardware, with the bulk of the cloud supported by Exadata and Exalogic appliances, Jewell said.
"The entire stack is based on Oracle technology," he said, before admitting that some networking equipment is BIG-IP hardware from F5 networks.
Jewell said the company is expecting "tens of thousands" of customers for Public Cloud. The service will not launch with a service-level agreement (SLA) for uptime, but Oracle hopes to provide a level of more than 99.95 percent. "I think we're thinking 99.97," he said.
