When Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) customers decide to migrate their on-premises infrastructure to Cloud IaaS, there’s one question that comes to mind: Should we use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or AWS?
In this article, we’ll dive into understanding the OCI vs. AWS conundrum, giving you 4 concrete reasons for why OCI offers significantly greater performance than AWS.
Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
To set the stage, we want to help you understand why Oracle Cloud is a premier choice for your Oracle EBS migration.
1. Research Insights from Gartner, Cisco, and IDG
The cloud is now the default platform for running nearly every new enterprise software application, and as such, it is the first choice for production workloads as well.
| Gartner forecasts that the worldwide public cloud market will reach $331 billion in 2022, with infrastructure services growing at an annual rate of 27.5%, faster than any other segment of the market. | Cisco predicts that 94% of enterprise workloads will be processed by cloud data centers by 2021-22 | IDG Research survey of 550 IT decision-makers found that 38% said they’re considering migrating all applications and infrastructure to the cloud. |
2. Use Cases for Moving Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud
Gartner research shows that it’s recommended for cloud architects to consider OCI not only for Oracle workloads, but also for use cases centered on bare-metal servers and high-performance computing needs or high-performance networking needs. Additionally, the adoption of OCI should be considered to run mission-critical Oracle and Non-Oracle workloads.
All leading research emphasize the following cloud infrastructure benefits:
- Technology performance
- Economic improvement, noting that 79% of customers plan to move to the cloud
However, a word of caution to all those customers is that the movement of the cloud should come with the “right-sizing” of the infrastructure. IT teams in a rush to move to the cloud, sometimes “undersize” the cloud thereby leading to poor performance, and “oversizing” will get you to a fat size invoice at the end of the month.
Oracle Cloud Specialist aka. CSPE certified category of expert partners can help ease this decision and ensure faster time to market along with ensuring precision and right methodology for maximizing your benefits such as technology currency, better usability, more flexibility, lower costs (lower TCO!).
When transitioned correctly and optimized with changing environments, the benefit can be realized through all departments in the organization and not just IT, e.g. Departments can convert their ‘ideas to market’: Faster Finance, Faster Business, Faster R&D, Faster Human Resource, etc.
3. TCO Benefits
These 5 numbers are real winners for every business that moves from on-premise to cloud solutions. Lower TCO, higher ROI, and improvements in key areas like forecast accuracy.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built for enterprises looking for higher performance, consistently lower costs, and easier cloud migration for their existing on-premises applications. OCI is consistently less expensive than AWS for a wide range of popular cloud workloads for several reasons:
(1) In the area of networking, charges for outbound bandwidth are 74% less expensive than AWS.
(2) For compute, Oracle delivers > 2X better price/performance over AWS for general purpose and memory-optimized instances.
(3) For HPC workloads, AWS provides similar performance to Oracle, but is 44% more expensive and provides no local SSDs, half the RAM, no RDMS networking, and no performance SLA, and
(4) For block storage, OCI offers as much as 20X the IOPS performance of AWS for less than half the cost.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure vs Amazon Web Services (OCI vs AWS)
1. OCI has a 2-5x Performance Advantage Over AWS in End-to-end Workload Performance
In the discussion of OCI vs AWS, Oracle maintains an arsenal of unique computed components that enable it to offer superior performance delivery within your deployment of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
How is this possible?
For starters, Oracle is home to the industry’s first high-performance bare-metal instances.
Storage review, a world-leading independent storage authority, discovered that Oracle bare metal with attached block volumes offers a 2-5x better performance than AWS EC2 i3.metal, manifesting itself in terms of record-low latency and excellent consistency in performance (1).
The results of the studies were so compelling it was enough to declare Oracle the 2018 Editor’s Choice award among all market-leading cloud service providers.
“The performance, simply put, blew us away. For each test we ran two sets of charts, as the latency discrepancy between the DenseIO and Standard was so great the charts would be difficult to read if all were on one set. In terms of how good storage performance on these instances is compared to traditional storage, they rival many of the best-shared storage options on the market, let alone cloud alternatives.”
“What makes the Oracle Cloud bare metal instances really incredible, though, is the locally attached NVMe storage. The DenseIO2.8 had 1 device, while the DenseIO2.52 had 8, giving these instances performance measured in the millions of IOPS.”
This technical prowess is normally only found in an on-premise environment. However, when we consider the mission-critical improvements in innovation and productivity that organizations receive on the business end [afforded by the agility and flexibility of the Cloud], it becomes evident why OCI is a popular selection among EBS customers who wish to not only advance their technical performance but also ensure that these operation enhancements deliver legitimate business value across the entire enterprise.
EBS or not, if you have high-performance intensive workloads such as HPC workloads, mission-critical database applications, and I/O intensive web applications, OCI is a promising solution. These bare-metal servers essentially allow you to receive uncompromising performance for your high storage and bandwidth requirements, and even as competitors race to include bare metal servers within their own offerings, Oracle will likely be the model for these future archetypes. Nonetheless, if performance alone isn’t enough to compel you forward in your decision to select Oracle as your Cloud IaaS provider…
2. For EBS Customers, the Total Cost of Ownership of OCI is 38% Less than On-Premise and 44% Less than AWS
The leading engineers who designed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure were architecting it for workloads like E-Business Suite. The streamlined deployment of EBS onto OCI enables vast cost reductions that other clouds could never match for the native-oracle user.
A portion of these cost reductions lies in the industry-wide advantage of switching to Cloud, that is, the pay-as-you-go purchase model that lets companies reduce their capital expenditures to take advantage of cloud flexibility as an operating/variable expense.
However, it’s the advanced services in place and robust configurations tailored towards Oracle workloads like EBS that warrant this sharp decrease in cost. The advanced compute performance alongside the tooling and automation features that support a seamless migration plus adaptable management of the cloud means less time and money is being spent on maintenance, expertise, migration accommodation, and day-to-day operations.
Additionally, their various migration options also allow you to avoid re-architecture and re-integration, meaning less disruption to business processes than any other provider. Less disruption means less troubleshooting and less troubleshooting means less overhead allocated to address incidents.
In sum, EBS customers can only achieve this level of cost reductions with such high-performance results through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Other providers simply don’t have the level of adaptability that Oracle has with handling EBS.
Another cause for the low cost is the granular control businesses have over their workloads that lets them proactively monitor their migration. EBS-to-OCI tools and features like the E-Business Suite Marketplace trial, E-Business Suite Cloud Manager, Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Management Cloud give EBS customers high levels of governance and control throughout the migration without having to withhold their licenses or make significant adjustments to their environment. This transparency and control over the process is simply more defense against unpredictable costs.
For example, Oracle E-Business Suite can be integrated with Oracle Access Manager for single sign-on integration, allowing you to fully control your Cloud Use procedures such as policies in place and end-user access (what type of access they have and to which specific resources). This software has been integral to the success of former EBS enterprises in their migration to OCI since it allows them to manage complex structures with rules enforcing groups of users with a simple to define policies.
3. This Governance and Control are Key to Why the Cost of Ownership is So Low for EBS Customers
The reliable performance garnered through Oracle’s advanced computing resources and the reduced hassle of managing the EBS migration means less incremental maintenance for you and more room for Oracle to offer their competitive services at a lower cost for their EBS customers.
As of right now, market leaders such as Amazon and Azure offer SLAs that only cover resource availability. What this means is, upon launch, you will be allocated a predetermined level of resources to power your infrastructure requirements across the duration of your agreed upon time frame.
Oracle, on the other hand, now offers SLA’s that cover two other important elements: Network Performance and Compute Manageability.
The new SLA agreements guarantee that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will provide over 90% of published performance each day within a given month. If performance drops below that for as little as 45 minutes a month, customers may request free service credits as recompense. The manageability element restores control within the client because it allows customers to autoscale and list resources according to their own provisioning preferences.
The point here is mutual accountability unseen before in the industry. To be the first to offer this level of client-catering shows a clear determination by Oracle to address the worries that businesses have in switching from on-premise to Cloud through their fair and accommodative business style.
In the discussion of OCI vs. AWS, Oracle has many procedures in place to assist EBS customers in migrating their on-premise workloads to OCI. If performance was a concern before, when you take into consideration the extensive efforts they are making to meet customer’s reliability and control demands (such as their new SLA model), deploying through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is an easy selection against AWS and other competitive solution providers, especially for EBS customers who they are already privy to.
The last, and for some, the most compelling justification for choosing OCI over AWS is…
4. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Offers Significant Security Posturing Due to their Isolated Compute and Off Box Virtualization
Oracle offers an advanced security architecture to guarantee a strong security posture for EBS customers moving onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Most cloud providers offer network and input/output virtualization within the hypervisor. Oracle on the other hand practices Off Box virtualization, providing maximum isolation and protection. Because of the Off Box Virtualization strategy, there is no provider (Oracle) code on the bare metal or virtual machines. Likewise, users are not given access to Oracle. This no trust architecture powered by their bare metal and VM compute means isolated network virtualization that supports limited room for the attack through the maximization of dedication, control, and visibility.
Oracle took a security-first approach when building their 2nd generation cloud. When you observe the security provisions in OCI vs. AWS, you see several security procedures offered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that is not offered in Amazon Web Services, such as Configuration Assessments, User Risk Assessments, Activity Audit Reporting, Sensitive Data Reporting, and Data Masking.
If security is a top concern for your EBS migration, rest assured, Oracle gives very little opportunity to external invasion and offers top of the line security reinforcement by deploying data assets in complete isolation away from other customers and Oracle Staff.
Additionally, the Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) provides isolation for your workloads from any other workloads on OCI, including your other workloads on a different VCN. This acts as a preventative measure against lateral attacks between data in different workloads, without negatively impacting the integration levels of those workloads.
If the nature of your business is data sensitive, or you are prone to worry regarding your security level when migrating to the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers more than you need to deliver a secure migration and deployment into the cloud.
Point of Consideration Before Migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure…
Settling on a provider for your Cloud IaaS is a huge accomplishment and a considerable portion of the work that comes with pursuing Cloud IaaS. The next step is beginning your migration. Unfortunately, businesses often severally underestimate the workload of migrating due to a general lack of education and technical skill required to manage the Cloud. According to Gartner, this leads to significant overspending and can lead to severe disruption of a business that is very hard to rectify once the migration has already begun,
Fortunately, many businesses suspect that they may not be fully qualified to handle an adoption unilaterally. For this reason, they often outsource to a systems integrator / managed service provider to assist them across the journey of their migration. If this is the approach you wish to take, it is within good reason. Gartner strongly urges businesses to take this route because SIs and MSPs can provide a safe migration to the Cloud and help you avoid the unforeseen costs that many businesses suffer along with their migration. Take this advice, otherwise, you risk losing all the rewards of the Cloud and experiencing significant losses that could severally jeopardize your business.