Abstract
Enterprises are accelerating AI while wrestling with multicloud complexity and rising sovereignty requirements. Pairing Hammerspace with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region provides a sovereign cloud foundation inside your data center, plus a unified, policy-driven data layer across sites and clouds. OCI Dedicated Region delivers OCI services with enterprise security and operational consistency, while Hammerspace presents a global namespace and orchestrates data placement by performance, cost, and compliance.
Market Context: Why This Matters Now
According to Gartner’s 2025 outlook (link), three of the six leading cloud trends that are shaping cloud adoption really stand out.
First, digital sovereignty is moving from policy to practice. Organizations need clear control over where data resides, who administers it, and whose operations are audited, often within national borders.
Second, hybrid cloud strategies are accelerating, but fragmented data and inconsistent tooling can create operational drag; success depends, in part, on simplifying data governance and unifying access across on-premises and multiple clouds. According to Gartner, “90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027.”
Third, AI/ML demand is surging, and enterprises are prioritizing architectures that bring compute to the data to reduce latency, contain egress, and help manage compliance tasks.
In addition, these trends correspond with the 3 key trends that the lead Dedicated Region PM (Chris Zappala) described at AI World ‘25 and in a recent webinar (Unlock the Future of the Cloud with Oracle: What’s New in Dedicated Region and Alloy), which reinforces the ongoing customer demand for control, simplicity, and flexibility in their cloud adoption strategy.
Put simply, organizations need a sovereign cloud foundation and a consistent way to work with data across locations and environments. Oracle delivers the sovereign foundation with OCI Dedicated Region, and the building blocks for performance and protection in our Storage portfolio. As a complement to the foundation, Hammerspace is an example of a partner that provides users a practical bridge to unify data access across sites and clouds.
What is OCI Dedicated Region
OCI Dedicated Region is a fully managed cloud region deployed in your data center and operated by Oracle. It delivers the same enterprise-grade capabilities available in Oracle’s Public Cloud, while helping address data residency, security, and regulatory compliance requirements on your premises. Customers gain direct access to 200+ OCI services, enabling teams to modernize applications and run workloads locally. Because the region runs where your data lives, you can improve latency for sensitive workloads, streamline audit and governance processes, and avoid unnecessary data movement that complicates compliance. For many enterprises, Dedicated Region provides a practical balance of control and cloud agility.
What is Hammerspace
Hammerspace is a high-performance data platform that unifies, manages, and optimizes storage across public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises systems through a global namespace. Built on open standards such as NFS v4.2 with pNFS, it uses metadata-driven automation to assimilate existing data in place, apply policy-driven placement, and orchestrate movement based on performance, cost, and compliance needs. Applications and users see data “as if local,” even when it spans multiple sites and storage types (including NFS, SMB, and S3 object stores), eliminating the operational burden of manual synchronization and reducing duplicate copies. For AI and HPC environments, Hammerspace can also enable a Tier 0 storage approach, elevating hot data to NVMe or SSD for sub-millisecond access and keeping GPUs fully utilized while maintaining a single global namespace.
Why Hammerspace + OCI Dedicated Region
Together, the two solutions help create a sovereign, unified data fabric. OCI Dedicated Region places cloud services where your regulated data must remain. Hammerspace provides a consistent data plane across that region and your other environments, enforcing policies that keep data in place or allow tightly controlled mobility. The result is an operating model that can help address residency requirements, simplify hybrid operations, and let you run AI where your data lives – without proliferating unmanaged copies or rewriting workflows.
Three Use Cases & Benefits
Use case #1 – Sovereign AI/ML at scale, with improved performance using Tier 0
Sensitive datasets (financial records, health information, citizen data) often cannot leave the country. By deploying AI infrastructure in OCI Dedicated Region, teams train and infer near the data while maintaining jurisdictional control. Hammerspace presents a governed global namespace to AI pipelines and applies policy-driven placement, access control, and lifecycle management. This helps reduce egress and copy sprawl, improve time to first model, and simplify audit through centralized logging and consistent controls.
Hammerspace enables a “Tier 0” storage layer – the fastest tier (typically NVMe/SSD) for hot AI/ML data – within its global namespace. It automatically promotes active files to Tier 0 and demotes colder data to low-cost tiers, sustaining GPU throughput and reducing latency, without manual data management. In OCI Dedicated Region, pairing Hammerspace Tier 0 with DenseIO or GPU shapes that include local NVMe enables delivery of a high-performance, sovereign architecture for data-intensive AI workloads.
Use case #2 – Hybrid cloud dataset unification and portability
Enterprises frequently split workloads across on-premises and multiple clouds, but fragmented data can slow projects and introduce governance risks. Using Hammerspace to bring data into one view, you can keep regulated data in your OCI Dedicated Region and let applications access it the same way everywhere, no matter where they run. Only what policy allows is moved or cached, enabling seasonal demand without replatforming data. The effect is fewer duplicated pipelines, stronger policy enforcement, and greater flexibility to choose the best venue per workload.
Use Case #3 – Data lifecycle modernization and disaster recovery
Legacy NAS and backup patterns can make it hard to meet recovery goals and can inflate storage costs. Consolidating data into Hammerspace’s global namespace enables policy-driven snapshots, replication, and tiering while OCI Dedicated Region serves as a sovereign primary or DR site with controlled replication paths. This approach helps make DR plans simpler, accelerate testing and recovery, and align placement with compliance requirements, all while improving cost efficiency through automated tiering.
Call to Action
Supplement your cloud journey adoption, growth, and sovereignty with Hammerspace on OCI Dedicated Region. For questions on adopting Hammerspace on future or existing Dedicated Region deployments, contact Will OBriant in OCI sales (will.obriant@oracle.com) and Warren Mead at Hammerspace (warren.mead@hammerspace.com).
Raj Sharma
Field CTO, Hammerspace