Digital Realty Deploys Private Connections To Oracle Cloud
Digital Realty introduced dedicated connections to Oracle Cloud Monday in more than a dozen American cities, delivering broader hybrid capabilities to enterprises running Oracle solutions.
After a year of rapid expansion fueled by acquisitions and partnerships, the data center operator based in San Francisco is looking to expand connectivity to public cloud providers, said Sean Iraca, Digital Realty's vice president of service enablement.
Through the Digital Realty Service Exchange platform launched in September 2016, Digital Realty already provides co-location customers with private connections to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, bypassing the internet to improve security and reduce latency.
The company wants to "add density to the Service Exchange platform," Iraca said, and "Oracle is certainly the next logical one for us. It’s a pretty high-demand destination of interest, given that massive install base that Oracle has today."
In several of the company's data centers, accessing Oracle's infrastructure won't involve a long trip — Oracle currently leases 500,000 square feet in 16 Digital Realty facilities.
Digital Realty will now deploy Oracle's FastConnect service at 14 facilities. Through those Service Exchange hubs, 59 more Digital Realty data centers will also support private connections to Oracle's cloud.
"There's a lot of growth, and it's coming from all verticals. Certainly cloud is a big part of that," Iraca told CRN.
Digital Realty is one of the co-location providers driving a major consolidation trend. The company paid $7.6 billion for DuPont Fabros in the industry's largest single deal of 2017, and recently entered a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation to expand its footprint in Japan. Three new Digital Realty data centers will soon come online in Frankfurt, Germany.
Digital Realty's main competitor, Equinix , also expanded connectivity to Oracle late last year through the FastConnect service. The two co-location giants closed a combined $19 billion in acquisitions in 2017.
Both operators, in addition to connecting to major public clouds, host infrastructure for those hyper-scale providers, offering them the ability to grow into new markets, or supplement their geographic availability for edge computing and network aggregation use cases.
Oracle, by bringing to market Oracle Cloud Machine virtual infrastructure and the Exadata platform, has done a lot to drive interest in its Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, Iraca said. While IaaS will be the initial focus for hybrid deployments, Digital Realty will watch closely to see what preferred use cases emerge around other Oracle services, including predictive analytics, Internet of Things and databases, Iraca said.
Eventually, Digital Realty hopes to better facilitate low-latency connectivity to Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings.
"As Oracle continues to define and mature their cloud strategy, specifically around their significant breadth of SaaS apps, all of that is going to be very interesting," Iraca said.
Digital Realty operates a channel program involving system integrators, VARs and master agents. The role of those partners, and those in the Oracle channel, will become more well-defined as the hybrid capability matures, he said.
"We’re going to be helping solve some of the migration, design architecture decisions through some of our partners," Iraca said.