First, let's look at what availability means. Webster's dictionary defines it as "the quality or state of being available". But in the cloud, it means much more than that. It means that your data needs to be available when you need it, that you get the performance you need and not suffer from the noisy neighbor problem, and finally, that you have the ability to be agile, adjusting your resources when you need to scale up and down.
OCI shows their commitment to being the CSP with the highest levels of availability.
NO DATABASE MEANS NO APPLICATION
First, let's look at your data, the core of any application. Only the Oracle cloud can run the database with technologies that give you availability with no single point of failure. You can lose compute, storage and network, and still not have a database outage. OCI is the only public cloud that can run RAC, enabling databases to continue to run across component failures, reducing potential data loss, and minimizing unplanned downtime created by first-generation clouds. The only way first-generation clouds can come close is by either trying to leverage unsupported technologies that attempt to resolve network limitations with emulation or by selling you that it is OK to take an outage. The question you need to ask yourself when looking for a cloud provider is, how much downtime can your business live with? Hours, days, weeks? All it takes is for a first-generation compute node to fail or their storage array to fail, and you have an outage. With technologies like the Exadata Cloud Service, you have 3x redundancy with the storage servers and up to 7x redundancy with compute nodes, depending on the size of your Exadata.
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING; SLAS
Next, and even more important, are Oracle's SLAs for IaaS and PaaS services. Their industry-first Service-Level Agreement shows OCI's ability to be online, perform, and manageable. OCI offers the industry normal 99.95% uptime for most of the IaaS and PaaS services, please 99.9% uptime for manageability and 99.9% performance SLAs. These performance SLAs are important, as they show Oracle's confidence that their cloud will perform as sold and that you will not experience the issues with noisy neighbor that the first-generation clouds experience daily. As a note, these are real SLAs, with the customer receiving credit for their downtime, IF it is experienced.
Manageability SLAs are also important, especially with SecDevOps and DevOps environments where customers are constantly building and destroying cloud resources. This is even more critical when customers use scaling technologies that leverage the Cloud Restful APIs to grow and shrink resources as the workloads change through the day. Losing the ability to manage your cloud can quickly snowball your application into a cost or performance issue.
If you are interested in learning more about Oracle Cloud as an option for your agency or organization, the Mythics Oracle Cloud Viability Assessment (CVA) is a great starting point to help us guide and collaborate with you to select the right cloud approach that fits your requirements, budget and unique environment or security needs. Mythics can help architect, securely migrate, and provide ongoing sustainment services to help maximize success.
If you are further along in your Oracle Cloud research and journey, we also have service bundles that can help jump-start an Oracle Cloud evaluation, implementation, and workload or application migration. Contact the Oracle experts at Mythics today!
Erik Benner, Vice President Enterprise Transformation, Mythics
