Oracle's cloud storage services

Oracle's cloud storage service will not frighten Amazon

With AN Open Stack-compatible API set and low costs, Oracle's new cloud storage service might sound like at Amazon, however it's meant chiefly for existing Oracle customers

Oracle's new cloud service is not meant for a similar crowd as Amazon's AWS, wherever a developer will whip out a master card and acquire started. Rather, it's for Oracle's existing enterprise customers UN agency need to carry and shift existing workloads to the cloud.



That said, OSCS (Oracle Storage Cloud Service) is one in all the primary Oracle cloud services speckled when Amazon's public cloud, elastic consumption mode. it is also one in all the few Oracle services somebody will register for at once. That compelled United States of America to require a better look.

Spinning up, loading up

Getting access to OSCS needs time for provisioning, as you may expect with any major cloud service. when making AN Oracle account and buying the service -- it took many minutes for the process to travel through -- I had to line up the cloud account and a credentials to access it. It took many additional minutes for the service to be initialized and to induce a service uniform resource locator end point. I conjointly had to pick a knowledge center (only Chicago or Ash burn was on the market for me).

The service wasn't terribly reliable initially. many times, the dashboard took over a moment to load. It generally came solely a blank page, and at one purpose, the services were entirely untouchable for many hours. Mercifully, this cleared up when daily approximately.

OSCS abstracts storage into containers -- Amazon S3 buckets, basically. Files uploaded square measure replicated across all 3 nodes in OSCS and square measure eventually consistent, however generally requests to retrieve a new created instrumentation are not right away honored. you'll conjointly apply easy key-value information to things. No file will be larger than 5GB, however the user will get around this by chaining along multiple files by manner of a manifest.

Container objects may be created in public accessible by ever-changing AN ACL on the instrumentation, however Oracle does not offer a CDN to handle giant volumes of traffic; customers have to be compelled to bring their own.

Containers will be either regular or archive containers. The latter, paying homage to S3's occasional Access Storage or ice mass tiers, value a lot of but the previous however have limitations: no bulk actions, no bound objects, and so on.

OSCS seems to be designed on prime of Open Stack Swift; at the terribly least, it uses a similar relaxing API because the Swift API. Creating, writing, and accessing objects will be through with easy REST commands, therefore i used to be able to use a straightforward Python script to speak to OSCS. conjointly on the market is -- what else? -- a Java library API, basically a wrapper for the remainder API.

The Java library offers one advantage over the remainder APIs: It provides cryptography for knowledge at rest and in transit, and it permits provisions for encrypting knowledge client-side. Uploading by secure FTP is additionally supported, ANd Oracle auto creates an SFTP account with its own credentials.
Cheaper by the dozen

In terms of raw value, OSCS is somewhat cheaper than Amazon S3. costs begin at three cents per gigabyte; Oracle starts at a pair of.4 cents per G. Archive storage is additionally cheaper: zero.1 cent per gigabyte/month, versus S3's one.25 cents per G for occasional Access or zero.7 cent per G for ice mass.

Like Amazon, all incoming knowledge with OSCS is free, as is that the 1st G outgoing for the month. Everything at the moment starts at twelve cents per gigabyte/month and goes down, versus Amazon's nine cents per G, and likewise there square measure fees on the amount of requests: zero.5 cents per one,000 requests for traditional storage, versus S3's one cent. Delete requests value nothing on each services.

Oracle conjointly provides AN undeterred version of the service. For $30 per T per month, the user will store unlimited numbers of objects, a concept that Amazon does not have a true equivalent.

Amazon is not banking on worth alone to stay competitive, though. Its position as AN incumbent and therefore the made culture of solutions designed around it square measure exhausting to displace. Plus, cloud services habitually one-down one another with rounds of worth cuts on nearly each service they provide, therefore Oracle's near evaluation features a closing date. And whereas Oracle exploitation Open Stack's genus Apis may be a smart plan, Amazon counters with well-documented, wide used, and completely understood genus Apis.

OSCS chiefly provides AN Open Stack-compatible API for cloud storage employed by Oracle customers as they move their apps to Oracle's infrastructure. It's unlikely to steal any of Amazon's thunder, unless Oracle has additional in mind than low evaluation as a draw.

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