Oracle announced that Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition, the current long-term support release of Oracle Database, is now certified and available on the popular Arm architecture for both cloud and on-premises deployments. Specifically, you can now subscribe to Oracle Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Ampere® Altra® processor (OCI Ampere A1) compute instances and you can run Oracle Database 19c on Ampere Arm-based servers of choice—with both options providing highly economical price points. Oracle Database customers are building increasingly complex applications using more data—as well as AI/ML and JSON documents with greater interactivity and more database processing requirements than ever—so the timing of this Arm certification is ideal for organizations worldwide.
The eco-friendly and energy-efficient architecture of Arm technology, and specifically Ampere processors, has made it popular in hyperscale cloud data centers, and more than 180 billion processors have shipped in mobile phones, IoT sensors, and other smart devices to date. Ampere processors bring these cost-effective properties to the enterprise, enabling you to develop and operate increasingly complex workloads and modern applications.
The great news is that you can now run your Oracle Database 19c workloads with predictable performance at a lower cost, specifically with the Ampere Altra processor family in both cloud and on-premises environments—including AmpereOne processors. These processors provide a single thread per core architecture, enabling organizations to run workloads with consistent and predictable performance while achieving excellent performance scaling. The cores are wholly isolated from the “noisy neighbor” impact of other hardware threads running on the same core. This is a benefit for both scale-up workloads that require a very high core count, and for scale-out workloads that benefit from multiple instances of smaller VM shapes. Predictable performance also means a more predictable invoice at the end of the month. Lower power consumption results from a CPU architecture designed with sustainability as a core design priority.
Today’s announcement highlights the broad architectural shift across the market to Ampere processors that meet the demands of both modern cloud and on-premises environments,” said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer of Ampere. “With the Ampere Altra family of processors, customers of the world’s most popular database—Oracle Database—now have a high-performance, energy efficient architecture built with sustainability in mind for organizations of all sizes.
Oracle’s converged database improves both developer and operational productivity by supporting any data, workload type, and development style. Oracle Database greatly simplifies application development, data integration, and database management by enabling you to use a single industry-proven, enterprise-grade database that can be deployed anywhere instead of requiring a different single-purpose database for each data type and workload—along with the learning curves, associated management, and individual bills for each one. Full compatibility with Oracle Database deployments in the cloud and on-premises allows you to develop applications once and run them wherever they are needed.
Oracle Database Service on OCI—Extremes of Energy Efficiency and Cloud Economics
Oracle Database Service offers flexible VM shapes of AMD E4, Intel X9, and now Ampere A1. Using Oracle Database Service, organizations greatly reduce management by eliminating infrastructure management and automating database provisioning, patching, backup, and disaster recovery using cloud automation tools. User-controlled cloud automation increases both administrator and developer productivity.
The OCI Ampere A1 database shape is based on the Ampere Altra processor with single-threaded cores, which means no sharing of the execution engine, registers, and L1/L2 cache between threads. Combined with OCI’s high-performance architecture and non-blocking networks, Ampere Altra processors deliver predictable performance. These processors are now available in a flexible VM shape to right-size your workload from 1- 57 OCPUs with 8 GB of memory per OCPU, up to a total of 456 GB and 1 Gbps of network bandwidth per OCPU, up to a total of 40 Gbps.
Customers can select from several Oracle Database Service licensing options, including Enterprise Edition, High Performance, and Extreme Performance. Plus, you can start for free with our Free Tier, with additional free resources available for qualified developers, ISVs, and universities from the Oracle Arm Accelerator Program.
You can leverage the already available Ampere A1 compute instances in OCI, for end-to-end Arm-based application development and deployment. Additionally, Oracle APEX is a no cost add-on to Oracle Database Service. It provides a comprehensive low-code platform to build and deploy powerful, responsive, and scalable web apps for both mobile devices and desktops. Using APEX and the Ampere A1 flexible database shape, that is 100% compatible with on-premises Enterprise Edition environments, developers can quickly create data-centric applications to visualize and manage relational, JSON, and spatial data.
Oracle is the only hyper-scale cloud provider that delivers the same operating system—Oracle Linux—that we use in our cloud as the hypervisor/host and for every single service that we build/deploy. No other cloud vendor does that.
Arm Support for On-Premises Oracle Database Environments
With today’s announcement, you can now run the highest-rated database on the market on the cost-effective and scalable Arm-based platform, with specific advantages available for Ampere Altra customers. In fact, Oracle Database 19c costs half as much when running on Ampere Altra processors due to the low Core Processor Licensing Factor of 0.25 (details here).
Migrating databases to Arm is fast and simple: Oracle databases running on existing platforms can use Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up databases on their existing platform and restore to the Arm platform. All supported features of Oracle Database 19c are available on the Arm platform as well.
Enabling Everyone to Have Access to Arm
OCI Arm Accelerator is a 365-day Free Trial that offers free credits to open source developers, research universities, industry partners, and Oracle customers to run their workloads on Arm and contribute to the Arm ecosystem. The free credits can be used towards the Oracle Database Service on OCI Ampere A1, OCI Ampere A1 Compute, and other OCI services for the duration of the trial or until all the credits are used—whichever comes first.
Our goal is to offer enough Arm resources to develop your first application, test Arm at real-world scale, and even build or port a production application. Just sign up here, and you’ll get access, along with more than 20 great Always Free services. The Arm Accelerator to scale your Arm development projects provides qualified open source developers, researchers, and industry partners with up to $3,000 in credits valid for 12 months to help expand the Arm ecosystem and solve the next challenging scientific problem faster.