Why Autonomous Database Dedicated is the perfect home

March 27, 2023 | 5 minute read
Phani Turlapati
Outbound Product Manager - Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure
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Cloud adoption has accelerated in the last five years, but enterprise application migrations to the cloud have been much slower because of the monolithic nature of the application and stringent requirements of security, performance, availability, and scalability. Oracle met these demanding requirements with Exadata on-premises, and it was widely embraced worldwide. When the time came to build the Oracle cloud, we laid the same requirements as the foundation. Oracle built the second-generation cloud with Enterprise IT in mind, so Exadata stands at the core. Then we added automation to Exadata that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver a true autonomous experience.

To meet the increased demands of mission-critical and business-critical Enterprise applications, such as data residency and sovereignty, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer and Exadata Cloud@Customer, both capable of hosting Autonomous Database. If you have no concerns regarding data residence, the public cloud on OCI is the right choice to deploy Autonomous Database. For predictable performance, agility, more security and isolation, and operational flexibility and control, Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure gives you all the benefits of the Autonomous Database on a private cloud in the public cloud. It’s ideally suited for enterprise-, business-, and mission-critical applications.

You might ask why you should care about dedicated infrastructure when everything works just fine in other clouds on infrastructure built with shared, commodity hardware. Infrastructure requirements between running departmental or cloud native microservices applications and running business-critical applications that keep your company running have a lot of differences. I can explain further with the question, "When is it better to live in a house than an apartment?”

A graphic depicting an apartment complex and a house, representing different value propositions of different lifestyles

Find your home in Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure

An apartment is a great way to start, especially when you’re checking out a neighborhood, you’re looking for more temporary housing, or you don’t have enough money to buy in the neighborhood you prefer. In an apartment, the infrastructure, such as plumbing, electrical, and common areas, and all amenities are shared. You might have noisy neighbors, lack privacy, feel less secure, or be bothered by so many others in close proximity. In short, you don’t have full control over your own environment.

In a house, the infrastructure is dedicated to you for your exclusive use. You own it and use it in any way you want. You might pay extra, but for many people, the benefits greatly outweigh the cost: The freedom to choose how you live, complete isolation from your neighbors, separate infrastructure, security systems, and more. You have full control over your environment. You can even rent out your spare rooms (Spare capacity outside this metaphor) to split the costs of ownership with others.

As you look to deploy workloads in the cloud, based on the analogy, do you want to live in an apartment or a house? Your infrastructure should reflect your needs, depending on the workload requirements. For enterprise-, business- and mission-critical applications, dedicated infrastructure gives you complete control over your database environment. For example, applications like PeopleSoft, J.D.Edwards (JDE), Seibel, E-Business Suite (EBS), and other critical custom applications that run your business require the highest levels of availability, performance, security, and isolation that dedicated infrastructure provides. Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure provides all these benefits and adds the capabilities of an autonomous database.

Autonomous Database allows Oracle to monitor and react to network or hardware failures that can lead to business downtime by employing ML that can detect potential failures even before they occur. Backups, OS and database patching, and other database management activities are handled by Autonomous Database Dedicated. With these database management activities, the Autonomous Database can also manage data access most efficiently by automated tuning features. Autonomous Database Dedicated can make the most time-consuming activities the responsibility of the database and not your staff.

The Autonomous Database runs efficiently because it runs on the hardware designed to run Oracle Database the best: The Exadata Database platform. This level of assurance or performance can’t be matched guaranteed with other services that run on commodity hardware.

For Exadata Database service customers (Dedicated Infrastructure in our public cloud and Cloud@Customer) who have spare capacity, we recently released Multiple virtual machine (VM) on Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure and Multiple VM on Exadata Cloud@Customer, allowing you to deploy both Exadata Database VMs and Autonomous Database VMs on the same Exadata Cloud Infrastructure. So, you can extract more value from your Exadata Cloud Infrastructure investment.

Let’s also look at some examples of how an Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure is ideal for enterprise applications. For an independent software vendor (ISV) building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, the control over the data is extremely valuable. In these cases, with Operator Access Control (OpCtl) setup, Oracle must ask you, and you grant them access to your systems to patch. Everything that Oracle does is logged, and if you don’t like what they’re doing, you get to ask them to leave. It’s a Trust-but-Verify model.

Similarly, you can test any new version of your application, such as code changes, autoscaling tests, database tests, and GI and OS updates, on the developer or test environment and propagate stable changes to the staging or UAT environment. Next, you can push the most stable version to the production environment, which eliminates any surprises that can be detrimental to the business.

Many more features like these examples are available. To learn more about what Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure can offer you, refer to our documentation.

Get started today

Design the next-gen applications focusing on agile development and exploring business cases that build your intellectual property (IP) with OCI. Even better, enable line of business users to create their own application using the low- and no-code development platform built into the Autonomous Database. Best of all, you can forget about mundane operational activities or fearing a lapse of security. Get started with an Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure with Oracle LiveLabs, a way for you to get hands-on experience and build up your technical skills. When you feel ready to explore Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, get unlimited services like Autonomous Database with the Always Free Tier.

Phani Turlapati

Outbound Product Manager - Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure


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