Working for one of the world's most trusted database companies is sure to provide a unique perspective into the enterprise sector as well as the overall business climate. Ashish Ray, Oracle's vice president of Mission-Critical Database Product Management, visited the AMD EPYC TechTalk podcast to share his insights into evolving customer needs, the role Oracle plays in shaping the future of enterprise data management and how the company leverages AMD EPYC processors to deliver the kind of performance enterprise customers demand. The full interview is available here. Highlights from our talk are posted below.
Do more with less. Those are the marching orders today for data-center managers worldwide. Increasingly, they're tasked with providing higher performance and capacity while reducing energy consumption, the size of facilities, and perhaps most importantly, the costs. To help manage all this, companies continue to turn to Oracle, a pioneer in database management since being founded in 1977.
In the nearly 50 years since, business has seen enormous technological change, but Ashish says Oracle has remained the preeminent database-management company through continuous innovation and by providing "the most versatile database around."
As examples, Ashish cited the numerous data types supported by Oracle database, including JSON, document processing, text, spatial, graph analytics, and AI vector data. Ashish says this kind of broad support eliminates application and data fragmentation while leading to increased developer productivity. Another factor in Oracle's longevity is its determination to supply customers with mission-critical capabilities, including data replication and specialized data protection. At a time when cyber-security threats are more pervasive, preserving data and transactions during hardware or software failures is critical.
Oracle's innovations have enabled the company to keep pace with customers' rapidly changing needs. Ashish credited Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with driving growth in the cloud database business. Additionally, the Oracle Exadata Cloud platform has attracted customers in part by enabling them to operate cloud services, including autonomous databases, in their own facilities and behind their own firewalls.
"As a result, [customers] can take advantage of our highly flexible and intelligent cloud automation and economics without having to move everything to the cloud at once," Ashish said.
Providing the necessary compute performance for OCI since its creation in 2016 is AMD. Each generation of AMD's EPYC processors have been integrated since that time into the Oracle Cloud bare metal platform. In December, OCI announced it would add AMD Instinct MI300X to the company’s accelerated computing instances for AI, enabling AMD to support Oracle Cloud Supercluster with lightning quick RDMA networking. Oracle's Exadata platform also features AMD's 4th generation EPYC processors.
"AMD has been a terrific partner with us," Ashish said. "We work closely with AMD when we develop the latest generations of Exadata to make sure we could get the most out of the processors, both in database servers and storage servers. The key to our great partnership is working together at a deep technology level to optimize the AMD chips, especially for Oracle database workloads."
When talking about the future of business, Ashish predicted a lot of cloud evolution in the coming years. He said that based on his communications with major enterprise customers, he expects enterprises to continue moving critical workloads to the cloud, but only after their capabilities have proven superior to on-prem.
He also predicted that more cloud services will follow Oracle's lead to make it easier for customers to adopt a multi-cloud approach. In March, Oracle and Microsoft expanded their collaboration as part of Oracle Database@Azure to bring multi-cloud availability to 15 regions globally. A similar deal was struck with Google.
"You need to be able to run across multiple systems and cloud regions," Ashish said. "This is one of the reasons that Oracle now has over 70 customer-facing cloud regions around the world. Customers absolutely love the flexibility that we offer through our cloud solutions… I think you will continue to see the garden walls come down between clouds so customers can use the best services in a multi-cloud environment."
