Oracle announces new Japanese data centre
Fri 10 Apr 2015
Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison has announced that the multinational tech giant plans to open its newest data centre facility in Japan towards the end of the year, which will bring the company’s data centre portfolio to 22 global sites.
Speaking yesterday at the Oracle CloudWorld Conference in Tokyo Ellison said that the company is expanding its data centre footprint to meet the rocketing demand for its cloud-based services, citing that over 60mn business users administer billions of transactions daily over the Oracle Cloud. “It’s gone from an idea to a multibillion-dollar business in the blink of an eye, and growing very rapidly,” said Ellison.
Increasing customer demand for compute capacity was not the only driver for the Japanese announcement. Ellison added that the new data centre was also planned to meet regional requirements for data handling within different countries. He pointed out as an example Sweden and its laws against companies collecting data about an employee’s gender. In this case, it is illegal for systems which serve Swedish customers to contain fields marked ‘male’ and ‘female.’
According to Ellison Oracle’s years of experience working with this kind of regional requirements at a traditional, on-premises level will allow the company to smoothly manage localisation in the cloud and encourage business leaders to take advantage of the new technologies.
“Why should every company build its own data centre?” argued Ellison. “Do you build your own electricity? Do you drill wells for your own water?”
Ellison added that Oracle has completely rewritten its code in order to meet user expectations for modern IT services with the latest business applications. “Taking an old application and moving it into someone else’s data centre is hosting—not really the cloud,” he explained. “You can call it cloud if you like, but you’re kidding yourself, because you won’t get the same cost benefits. It won’t run on your smartphone.”
