Oracle launches global Exadata service for AI & analytics
Oracle has launched its Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure, providing businesses with a new approach to deploying mission-critical applications and agentic AI workloads across various cloud regions while meeting local data residency requirements.
Service features
The recently available service is designed to support organisations as they manage high-availability applications and extensive global operations. Key aspects include automated data distribution and synchronisation across multiple sites, ensuring continued operation during regional outages. The service is intended to enable companies to deploy workloads, including those requiring real-time analytics, transactional capacity, and agentic AI processing, without complex configuration or management tasks.
Oracle states that the solution utilises a flexible, serverless architecture, allowing resources to scale in response to fluctuating workloads. Pricing is presented as simple and based on the number and types of virtual machines and storage selected, which the company says gives customers clear visibility of operational costs without hidden charges.
Industry adoption
PayPal has used Oracle Exadata for years to maintain performance consistency and critical system uptime. Akash Guha, Director of Database Engineering at PayPal, explained the company's plans for the new service:
"Providing exceptional customer satisfaction is important to PayPal, so we've been using Oracle Exadata for many years to provide lightning-fast response times and mission-critical availability. As our global business grows, we plan to provide even faster responses by using distributed solutions that are integrated with our core systems of record to provide extreme availability and performance. We look forward to using Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure's always-on, serverless architecture with built-in Raft replication to accelerate responses, enable greater application resilience, and lower costs with scalable resources."
Technical benefits
The new offering contains several mechanisms aimed at addressing the main requirements of agentic AI and global applications. These include high performance for large workloads and vector search, always-on availability through Raft replication and fault-tolerant architecture, support for data residency and sovereignty, and cost-efficiency through hyperscale, serverless implementation.
Wei Hu, Senior Vice President, High Availability Technologies at Oracle, commented on the challenges faced by customers aiming to distribute databases at scale:
"Customers often struggle to deploy and manage distributed databases due to the high cost and complexity involved in operating large numbers of servers across multiple data centres and regions. Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure's serverless architecture enables customers of all sizes to meet their diverse requirements at a low cost. Today, we are providing a mission-critical distributed database to the masses."
Oracle notes that the system naturally supports the full Oracle Database and SQL capabilities, enabling clients to distribute resources to multiple locations with minimal modifications to existing applications.
Workload support
The Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure has been designed with several specific use cases in mind. Its active/active/active architecture supports mission-critical processes such as payments, eCommerce, and securities trading by maintaining synchronised data across multiple centres. Automated data distribution policies allow enterprises in finance and healthcare to meet regulations on data sovereignty. User proximity features enable companies in sectors like retail, telecommunications, and healthcare to reduce latency by storing data closer to end users. Petabyte-scale analytics functionality provides for real-time streaming and processing, vital for manufacturing and utility industries, and the infrastructure's online transaction processing (OLTP) capability supports millions of transactions with low latency for AI-driven and analytic workloads.
AI and data perspectives
Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, said:
"In the age of AI, especially agentic AI, customers need a new approach to allow for vector processing across distributed global applications. Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure incorporates Exadata's extreme performance for AI processing and availability for the core back-end systems that implement agent-initiated tasks, while Exascale's hyper-elastic and pay-per-use capabilities makes it very cost-effective. With this service from Oracle, CIOs can confidently deploy agentic AI and mission-critical applications globally and meet local data residency requirements."
According to Oracle, by overcoming barriers related to performance, data sovereignty, cost, and elastic scalability, the service aims to appeal to a range of industries where operational continuity, data compliance, and processing performance are mandatory.
