Oracle Cloud To Open A New Data Center Region Every 23 Days

In a massive data center expansion move, Oracle is planning to launch 20 new facilities over the next 15 months as it looks to better compete with hyper-scale cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Oracle is expecting to open a new data center region every 23 days on average over the next 15 months in a bold investment strategy to create 20 additional facilities across the globe.

The move comes as hyper-scale cloud operators such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft are continuing to invest billions in data centers this year following a record $120 billion in capex spending last year.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based software and cloud giant unveiled plans at OpenWorld this week to launch 20 new Oracle Cloud sites by the end of 2020, including 17 commercial and three government centers.

Looking at the cloud provider data center market, Microsoft Azure is currently available in 54 regions, followed by Amazon Web Services with 22 regions and Google Cloud Platform at 20 regions. Oracle Cloud plans to have a total 36 regions available by the end of 2020.

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Oracle Cloud will build new data centers in California, Chile, Montreal, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Singapore, Israel, South Africa, Belo Horizonte in Brazil, Osaka in Japan, Hyderabad in India, Chuncheon in South Korea, Newport in Wales, as well as two in Saudi Arabia and two in the United Arab Emirates. The company also intends to open two regions for the U.K. government and one for the government of Israel.

The top five worldwide hyper-scale data center spenders in the second quarter of 2019 were Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Other leading hyper-scale spenders include Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, Tencent and Baidu. Capex spending in building, expanding and equipping huge data centers hit $28 billion in the second quarter of 2019, down 2 percent year over year. The 2 percent drop was mainly due to hyper-scale capex decline in China, where the region was down a whopping 37 percent year over year in data center spending.

In terms of Oracle’s data center expansion, eleven of the countries or jurisdictions served by local cloud regions will have two or more centers to facilitate in-country or in- jurisdiction disaster recovery capabilities to meet business continuity and compliance requirements. Customers will have access to all Oracle Cloud Infrastructures services including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Fusion Applications, hoping to make it the most distributed cloud application platform in the market.

“Enterprise customers worldwide require geographically distributed regions for true business continuity, disaster protection and regional compliance requirements. Multiple availability domains within a region will not address this issue,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in a statement. “Unlike other cloud providers, Oracle is committed to offer a second region for disaster recovery in every country where we launch Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, a strategy that’s aligned with our customers’ needs.”

Oracle said its massive expansion is possible thanks to its Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure which provides highly optimized region deployment technologies that can implement a software-defined data center and cloud services in days.

The software giant touts its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as providing best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple pricing and having the tools to quickly bring enterprise workloads to the cloud.