Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

XenData debuts X1 Archive Appliance for LTO, cloud and optical disc to offer archiving functionality in a small footprint

Data storage company XenData launched on Tuesday its X1 Archive Appliance that connects to a network and allows file-based applications to seamlessly archive to LTO external drives, Sony Optical Disc Archive (ODA) drives or cloud object storage. The appliance runs Windows 10 Pro and is powered by XenData Archive Series and FS Mirror software.

The archive appears locally as a single logical drive – the X: drive, and comes with multiple ways to write to and restore files from it. The ‘Share the X’ drives over network and users can write to it and restore from it like any disk-based share. By using the FS Mirror, users can synchronize one or more locally accessible file systems or file shares to the LTO archive. The FS Mirror can create archive drop-boxes on the network that automatically move files to the archive, while using third party applications that integrate with XenData's XML API.

The X1 is available in three models: for LTO external drives, ODA external drives and for cloud. Each model is based on Intel NUC hardware and includes a high-endurance 1.92 TB SSD cache for enhanced performance.

The X1 for LTO connects to an LTO external drive via Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3, and for LTO drives with SAS connections, they may be connected via a Thunderbolt to SAS converter. The appliance manages an unlimited number of LTO cartridges and up to 2 billion files. It enables file transfers that span across cartridges and, when using two or more attached LTO drives, it supports automatic cartridge replication.

The X1 for ODA supports Gen 1, 2 and 3 drives with cartridge capacities up to 5.5 TB. They connect to the X1 via USB 3. As with LTO, the X1 manages an unlimited number of cartridges and it supports file transfers that use the 1.92 TB cache to span cartridges.

The X1 model for archiving to cloud storage supports multiple clouds including AWS S3, Azure and Wasabi S3. The system may be configured to replicate files to different cloud locations and different cloud providers.

The X1 Archive Appliance is immediately available. The models for managing an LTO or ODA external drive are priced at US$5,950 and the X1 for Cloud starts at $2,495.

Teradata leaps forward in cloud space with extended cloud analytics offerings and new partner - Google Cloud

Teradata announced new offerings to help companies use Vantage to simplify their analytic ecosystems and move forward from analytics to answers, wherever they are on their cloud journey. 

With these announcements, Teradata Vantage now unifies analytics, data lakes and data warehouses, all in the cloud.

Teradata will soon expand its public cloud offerings to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With this addition, Teradata’s as-a-service capabilities will be available across three global public cloud providers -- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Teradata is adding native support for low-cost storage – via object stores Amazon S3, Azure Blob and eventually, Google Cloud Storage – to ensure that Teradata Vantage customers can cost-effectively access and query 100 percent of their data to get a complete and integrated view of their business.

Teradata is adding consumption, or pay-as-you-go, pricing which gives Vantage customers the freedom to perform complex analytics on virtually any amount of data and pay only for what they use, down to the millisecond.

Teradata is offering a Hadoop Migration Program – a collection of tools, processes and services that help companies quickly move away from Hadoop and instead modernize their infrastructure with Vantage and native support for cloud object stores.

Teradata will soon expand its public cloud deployment offerings to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Offering Vantage on GCP means that Teradata manages the performance, security, availability and operations of the enterprise analytic environment using Vantage software and GCP compute and storage infrastructure, so that customers can focus on finding answers to their toughest business challenges.