This article is more than 1 year old

This Valentine's day Oracle's given you 12 big red data centres

Flowering fleet will still trail Azure and AWS

Oracle has announced plans to build a dozen new cloud data centres.

The company's not said if it plans to break ground by itself or co-locate in existing data centres, or how it plans to pay for the expansion. Investors don't seem to object to the likely multi-billion-dollar spend, as Oracle's shares ticked up just under half a per cent after the Monday announcement.

Oracle said the new build plan was spurred by demand for SaaS, IaaS and PaaS, so presumably the data centres will offer all of those services.

The announcement also revealed that China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Amsterdam and Switzerland are among the sites chosen for its new facilities. Canada will get two new bit barns and so will the USA, although they'll be reserved for government users.

If our read on Oracle's current cloud footprint is correct, it currently has eleven facilities worldwide. Adding another dozen will bring it to 23. That's a fair way behind the 53 operational and 12 planned availability zones operated by Amazon Web Services and Azure's 39 working or planned facilities. It will be more than Google's current 19, but the ad giant is known to be working on many more bit barns.

The expansion will just-about-double Oracle's cloud (it already has a facility in Amsterdam), which the company has pledged will be faster, cheaper and less hassle to operate than any other cloud.

In April 2017 CEO Mark Hurd defended previously Oracle's relatively paltry $1.7bn investment in bit barns compared to $31bn outlay from AWS, Microsoft and Google in 2016.

"If I have two-times faster computers, I don't need as many data centers. If I can speed up the database, maybe I need one fourth as many data centers. I can go on and on about how tech drives this," claimed Hurd.

Today's Oracle announcement also teases "new services in security, blockchain, and artificial Intelligence." Oracle announced security and AI services at its OpenWorld shindig in October 2017, and has included blockchain in some products for the banking sector for a couple of years. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like