Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer

Introduction

Do you prefer on-premises or public clouds for your database infrastructure? Or is your company in transit between both? Who really knows what’s the best solution? Is it a mix? With security and sovereignty being hot topics today, decisions are even more difficult to take.

For its database, Oracle has multiple offers. On-premises for sure (mostly Oracle Database Appliance and Exadata), public cloud for sure (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or Oracle Database Service in the other main cloud providers). There is also an intermediate solution since several years now: Exadata Cloud@Customer. This is basically an Exadata delivered in your datacenter and paid as a subscription, with hardware managed by Oracle.

The problem of this solution is that Exadata platform is too expensive for most of us. Something less ambitious was required for answering most of Oracle database needs. This is why a new offering has been recently presented by Oracle: Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer. Here are my initial thoughts about this new offering.

Key points of this new offer

Key points are quite similar to Exadata Cloud@Customer, with some differences:

• Oracle provides the pieces of hardware: you don’t buy them
• Oracle manages hardware and the underlying software (firmware, BIOS, hypervisor OS)
• OCI console (web based) is used to provision your servers (VM clusters) and your databases
• It can run Enterprise Edition (EE) databases like Exadata Cloud@Customer, but also Standard Edition 2 (SE2) databases
• You pay a fixed monthly price for hardware plus average CPU usage
• Unlike Exadata Cloud@Customer, you may also create application VMs with CPUs not used for databases
• CPU cost for application VMs is lower than CPU cost for databases
• You can Bring Your Own Oracle Database Licenses (BYOL) or pay them by usage (billed with the subscription)
• You can configure High-Availability with Real Application Cluster
• You can automate the lifecycle of your environment using APIs (ansible, DevOps, …)
• Root access to the database VMs is allowed, meaning that you can setup additional components
• You can configure a Disaster Recovery with a Data Guard configuration starting from 2x Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer

Technical specs

Now, let’s have a deeper look at the technical specifications.

This solution is composed of 3 components:

• 2 identical servers with each 2x 32-core AMD Epyc processors and 768GB RAM (2x 2U)
• 1 storage shelf (SAS) with 6, 12, 18 or 24 SSD disks of 7.68TB (1x 4U)

The servers runs on Oracle Linux and KVM.

On top of this system, you will provision VMs within these limits:

• 120 usable cores (60 usable cores on each node)
• 1320GB of RAM (660GB on each node)
• 11.6, 23.4, 35.3 or 47.2TB of usable storage depending on your configuration

A 2-core VM will be initially configured by Oracle for OCI remote access on each server. This VM is called the Control Plane Proxy Service (CPS). A physical 2-port Ethernet interface on each node is associated to this VM for physical isolation.

Embedded licenses model

You can keep your existing licenses for running your database workload on this platform (BYOL), or you can choose to go for embedded licenses.

If you choose embedded licenses, you will have 4 possibilities when you create an Oracle database VM:

• Standard Edition: basically the same features as SE2 + Transparent Database Encryption
• Enterprise Edition: classic EE features + Real Application Testing + Diagnostic and Tuning Pack
• Enterprise Edition High Performance : same as previous one + Partitioning + Advanced Compression + Database Vault + Multitenant
• Enterprise Edition Extreme Performance : same as previous one + Active Data Guard + RAC + In Memory

High Performance and Extreme Performance don’t really bring more performance, but they pack more options. Note than you cannot add a single option. For example, if you need more than 3 PDBs on your container database, you must go for Enterprise Edition High Performance for the Multitenant option.

With the embedded licenses, you can optimize the cost of your licenses:

• Mix various editions on your Base Database Cloud@Customer, according to your needs
• License cost nothing when the VM is down
• You can increase the number of CPUs for some VMs during specific timeframes in the year

Would it be a better choice to keep your existing licenses? I would answer with another question: if you don’t own the servers, why would you keep your license ownership?

Is it an ODA Cloud@Customer?

Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a cheaper solution compared to Exadata. But until now, it didn’t exist as a Cloud@Customer solution. Is Base Database Cloud@Customer a kind of ODA Cloud@Customer?

Yes, and no.

Yes because technically, this solution is based on an ODA X11-HA with slightly more RAM (768GB on each node) with a single storage shelf (SSD-only – high performance version). This shelf is populated with 6, 12, 18 or 24 SSDs according to your needs. It will mostly cover the same features as the HA ODA, creating DB Systems with 19c and/or 26ai databases, running SE2 or EE databases, creating application VMs…

No because Oracle didn’t choose ODA Cloud@Customer naming for obvious reasons. First, odacli commands don’t exist for managing your environment. Since 2016, odacli is the central CLI used for managing mostly bare-metal ODAs. Second reason is that you won’t be able to configure bare metal databases on this new solution: you can’t connect to the OS of the nodes. These nodes are under Oracle responsibility. Last reason for not calling it an ODA: it’s a service based on classic servers. ODA is also based on classic Oracle servers, with no dedicated technologies for databases.

What is the benefit compared to ODA?

ODA became expensive, especially this year. Base price is 37’655$ for the small one, according to the latest price list from June. RAM and disk price hikes made some of our customers not able to afford an ODA infrastructure anymore. Renewing a database infrastructure without buying servers may help.

Another trend is less complexity. Some experienced Oracle DBAs are gently approaching retirement, some others have much more database technologies to handle and they cannot be Oracle experts anymore. Less complexity regarding Oracle database is welcomed, and managing database lifecycle through OCI console is rather easy.

If buying servers doesn’t make any sense for your company, and if you don’t have enough skills to deploy, patch and manage an ODA, this new solution should be considered.

How it compares to Exadata Cloud@Customer?

What makes Exadata so different than any other solution is the smart storage. Instead of having direct-attached disks or a SAN with its own intelligence, Exadata has several dedicated servers with disks, flash cards and database intelligence. These servers are called the storage cells. These cells will process some SQL statements and do the filtering before sending the blocks to the compute nodes. This is what’s called cell offloading. An old legend tells that you don’t need indexes for a database running on Exadata… For sure, with some optimizations you can probably expect the highest performance on the market.

Base Exadata is much more complex than ODA as it includes 2 computes nodes, 3 storage cells and 2 RoCE fabrics (basically 40Gbps switches for high-speed connection between the compute nodes and the cells). And you can scale up for more compute nodes (maximum of 8) and more storage cells (maximum of 12): you cannot do that on an ODA.

You can replace Exadata with Exadata Cloud@Customer and ODA with Base Database Cloud@Customer in these previous sentences.

Some features won’t be available on Base Database Cloud@Customer like Autonomous database.

On the other hand, Exadata Cloud@Customer cannot run SE2 databases and application VMs.

A colleague of mine told me that unlike Exadata Cloud@Customer, Base Database Cloud@Customer won’t come with a complete rack: setup will be done in an existing rack.

What about the cost?

Pricing is publicly available here: https://www.oracle.com/database/base-database-service/pricing/

Like an Exadata Cloud@Customer, you won’t buy this machine. But you will pay $8,000 once for the initial setup.

This system has a base configuration with 6 disks, and you can buy (lease) up to 3 storage expansions of 6 disks. Each storage expansion costs $1,900.00 each month.

Here is a summary of monthly hardware cost:

You’ll need to add usage cost, based on ECPU per hour. On this platform, ECPU equals to 1/4 of a core. You can Bring Your Own License, or pay the license by usage:

Example: if you need a Base Database Cloud@Customer with 12 disks and an average of 32 ECPUs with embedded EE licenses, the overall cost for one year is:
10,021 * 12 + 32 * 0.1075 * 24 * 365 = $150’386 without the initial setup cost.

Note that you should consider 2 machines because you probably need a Disaster Recovery setup. I would recommend 2 identical machines.

Advantages and limits of this solution

These are the advantages I see:

• you don’t buy the servers, they belong to Oracle and you just pay for using them: this is better for a lot of companies
• you will benefit from TDE, Transparent Database Encryption: TDE is normally an option on top of Enterprise Edition only
• you won’t manage the servers yourself: you will only manage the VMs and the databases more easily
• opting for embedded licenses brings flexibility: increase the CPU when you need to, stop your test and development databases when they are not in use…

On the other hand, these are the limits I see:

• the cost is still too expensive for those running a small number of databases on small ODAs like X11-S and X11-L
• the limit of 32 ECPUs for Standard Edition VM (8 cores): this limit does not exist on ODA X11 series
• the storage, 44TB being not that big
• database version: don’t expect to deploy database versions older than 1-year old
• choosing embedded licenses means stopping paying Oracle support for your perpetual licenses: you’ll need to buy them again later if you want to go back to on-premises or IaaS solutions

Is this the best solution for your needs?

For now, this solution is new and no one at dbi services gets his hands on it. It could come in the coming weeks or months.

To find out if this solution could fit your needs, you must have a deep knowledge of your current infrastructure and an overview on your future needs. I strongly advise starting with a complete infrastructure review. Correct sizing for whatever solution you may consider has to be done with accuracy. Especially for Cloud or Hybrid Cloud solutions that requires surgical precision!

If you cannot do this kind of work yourself, this is something we’re used to do at dbi services since many years.

Conclusion

This new offering brings new possibilities for those who prefer the subscription model (OPEX) without going to the public cloud. But it has some limits. Main limit is that it’s not affordable enough for companies used to lower cost solutions like ODA X11-S and ODA X11-L. But this is definitely an in-between: you want a modern platform without the cost of Exadata Cloud@Customer? That might be Base Database Cloud@Customer. My thought is that performance could be quite similar to Exadata Cloud@Customer for most databases.