Oracle's New Distributed Exadata Database Boosts AI App Uptime

Oracle has announced the general availability of its new Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure, a service designed to streamline the deployment of mission-critical applications across its global cloud regions. This innovative offering automatically distributes, stores, and synchronizes data across multiple geographic locations, ensuring applications remain operational even during widespread regional outages. A key benefit of this architecture is its ability to help businesses meet stringent data residency regulations, a growing concern for enterprises operating internationally.

The service operates on a flexible, serverless architecture, enabling it to dynamically scale resources up or down in response to changing workload demands, all without requiring complex manual setup or ongoing management. This adaptability translates into an “always-on” environment, reduced operational costs, and simplified global expansion for organizations handling diverse workloads, including real-time analytics, high-volume transaction processing, and autonomous AI applications. The system offers transparent access to data, supported by a comprehensive set of data distribution policies, further aiding customers in managing data sovereignty and optimizing performance.

The tangible benefits of such a system are already being anticipated by early adopters. Akash Guha, director of database engineering at PayPal, noted his company’s long-standing reliance on Oracle Exadata for its speed and availability in ensuring customer satisfaction. Looking ahead, Guha stated, “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.” This highlights the critical need for robust, globally distributed database solutions in the financial sector.

Oracle’s new service is particularly tailored to meet the demanding requirements of modern AI workloads, especially those involving “agentic AI”—autonomous AI systems that perform specific tasks. It delivers high performance, allowing for the handling of massive data volumes and complex vector searches across extensive datasets by leveraging the elastic scalability of the Exascale Infrastructure. Mission-critical availability is ensured through advanced replication technologies like Raft, facilitating immediate, zero-data-loss failover across data centers and regions, thereby maintaining continuous operations. Furthermore, the platform simplifies data residency challenges for AI vectors and business data alike, offering automated distribution methods. Its hyperscale, serverless design also contributes to cost-efficiency, enabling dynamic scaling to match the fluctuating demands driven by user interactions with AI applications.

The service provides a consistent and efficient database experience worldwide, making it an ideal choice for enterprises operating across multiple geographies. Crucially, it supports the full capabilities of Oracle Database and SQL, minimizing the need for extensive application rewrites when distributing databases across various locations. This unique data architecture is designed to bolster demanding workloads, supporting “always-on” databases through an Active/Active/Active architecture for critical use cases like payment processing, e-commerce, and stock trading. It also improves user proximity by storing data in OCI data centers closest to users, vital for applications in entertainment, retail, healthcare, and telecommunications. Beyond transactional needs, the system facilitates petabyte-scale AI and analytics, capable of processing millions of records per second from real-time streaming data, essential for data-intensive industries such as manufacturing and utilities. Similarly, it enables hyperscale Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), supporting millions of transactions per second with petabyte-scale data and near-instant response times, crucial for real-time image recognition, online marketing, and the aforementioned agentic AI.

Addressing the inherent complexities of managing distributed databases, Wei Hu, senior vice president of High Availability Technologies at Oracle, emphasized the service’s accessibility. “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 centers and regions,” Hu noted. “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.” This sentiment was echoed by Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, who highlighted the service’s innovative approach for vector processing in global distributed AI applications. Mueller stated, “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.”