OCI Dedicated Region FAQ

General

What is OCI Dedicated Region?

OCI Dedicated Region (previously known as Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer) enables customers to deploy an Oracle Cloud region in their own data center. OCI Dedicated Region offers customers essentially the same experience as Oracle’s public cloud regions, including access to more than 100 of the same cloud services and the agility, scalability, and economics of the public cloud.

What are the key benefits of OCI Dedicated Region?

OCI public cloud regions are designed to meet standard foundational needs, such as security, high service availability for enterprise workloads, a broad set of innovative technology and services, and a robust partner ecosystem. However, there are scenarios where enterprise and government customers have additional requirements that prevent them from moving to the public cloud, including data sovereignty considerations.

With OCI Dedicated Region, customers can access the latest cloud technology offered in OCI public cloud regions from within their own data center. This unique architecture enables customers to modernize their infrastructure and applications without migrating to the public cloud. While other cloud providers offer a limited subset of their services beyond any of their public cloud regions, OCI Dedicated Region provides customers with a complete cloud experience in the geographic location of their choice, as explained further in this FAQ.

Hosting their data and applications within their own data center facilities helps customers address their security, regulatory, low-latency, data residency, and sovereignty requirements.

Who can use OCI Dedicated Region?

OCI Dedicated Region is available to enterprise customers and government organizations.

What services are offered on OCI Dedicated Region?

OCI Dedicated Region offers more than 100 of the same services as Oracle’s commercial public cloud regions. With OCI Dedicated Region, customers have access to the latest managed cloud services, including innovative generative AI, analytics, and machine learning services. With these services, customers can run large language models on-premises while maintaining tight control over data flows and metadata for regulatory and proprietary purposes.

OCI Dedicated Region also enables customers to run Oracle SaaS products such as ERP, financial, HCM, and SCM applications, making it the only solution to offer a completely integrated cloud experience for on-premises IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Customers can also use other OCI services for lift-and-shift scenarios or for incremental upgrades of legacy applications using modern cloud primitives while continuing to address demanding performance and compliance needs.

How elastic is OCI Dedicated Region?

Oracle takes a proactive approach to capacity planning in OCI Dedicated Region. Oracle partners with the customer in the capacity planning process and aims to provide sufficient physical resources to meet growing demand. Customers can start small and scale up to more than 450 racks while retaining control of their data and services. Oracle plans to install, operate, support, and upgrade each OCI Dedicated Region in the same way it maintains OCI public cloud regions worldwide.

What type of SLAs does OCI Dedicated Region offer?

OCI Dedicated Region aims to offer the exact same SLAs for availability, manageability, and performance as a single availability domain in an Oracle public cloud region. For example, if you deploy your application across multiple fault domains, a compute SLA with an aim of 99.95 percent availability applies. Visit the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Level Agreement (SLA) page for more details about OCI Dedicated Region SLAs.

In which countries is OCI Dedicated Region available?

For a list of countries where OCI Dedicated Region can be deployed, please contact Oracle.

Are there any prerequisites for deploying OCI Dedicated Region in my location?

Yes, comprehensive site planning that accounts for considerations such as power, space, and networking is required to enable proper installation and deployment of OCI Dedicated Region. Please fill out this web form to get started. An Oracle representative will contact you within three to five business days.

How long does it take for OCI Dedicated Region to be available for use?

Once the customer-provided data center is ready to receive OCI hardware, OCI Dedicated Region can be available for use within months. An Oracle project manager will provide weekly updates and coordinate with your facilities management team to strive to provide timely and safe delivery of the region.

What is the pricing for OCI Dedicated Region?

The pricing for OCI Dedicated Region is intended to be the same as for Oracle’s commercial public cloud regions. You pay only for services you consume and benefit from the same predictable low pricing. You can continue to use all existing Oracle tools, such as budgets, cost analysis, invoices, and usage reports, to monitor and audit the usage of OCI Dedicated Region. Pricing for Oracle’s commercial public cloud regions is available on the OCI Pricing page.

Is there a minimum commitment for OCI Dedicated Region?

Yes, an OCI Dedicated Region order is a consumption-based commitment over a period of five years. The hardware footprint of OCI Dedicated Region is designed to grow with the customer’s workloads. At initial deployment, the footprint is based on the customer’s forecasted consumption for the first year. After that, resource consumption and availability are continuously monitored, and the OCI Dedicated Region footprint is expanded as needed.

How does a customer’s OCI Dedicated Region deployment get new features and security updates?

OCI Dedicated Region is a fully functional cloud region that Oracle upgrades with new features as they become available in public cloud regions. Additionally, Oracle continually executes security updates to help you maintain the highest levels of security. Note that new services or capabilities that require additional infrastructure will be deployed at the rate at which Oracle can expand into your data center facilities.

Are customers responsible for the hardware?

No, OCI Dedicated Region is a fully managed service from Oracle that includes hardware, software, cloud services, support, and so on. There’s presently no need for a separate capital purchase or hardware or software integration.

How do I request technical support for workloads running in OCI Dedicated Region?

All customers can use My Oracle Support to request technical assistance. Please note that for any physical maintenance, Oracle will schedule a time and require access to your physical facilities.

Who is responsible for the physical security of OCI Dedicated Region?

OCI Dedicated Region is operated and managed based on a shared responsibility model between Oracle and the customer. After activation, Oracle will continue to support all physical activities required within the facility that houses Oracle-owned computing and networking equipment (the Oracle secure area). Oracle will troubleshoot and resolve any physical hardware issues, manage data destruction events, and perform planned operational audits within the Oracle secure area. Customers are responsible for the data center uptime, physical compliance of the facility, maintaining the data center within the agreed temperature and humidity levels, and ensuring power and cooling for all racks within the Oracle secure area.

How does disaster recovery (DR) work with OCI Dedicated Region?

DR for OCI Dedicated Region requires at least two data centers that are interconnected and separated by a sufficient distance (at least 50 miles to 100 miles) to protect against natural disasters. Customers are responsible for determining the distance between the primary and DR sites as per their DR requirements and local regulations.

Developer Experience

How do I connect to my OCI Dedicated Region?

You can connect to OCI Dedicated Region just like you connect to a public cloud region, using Oracle tools, SDKs, and the management console. For example, once OCI Dedicated Region is available to you, you can configure the command-line interface with a region identifier created as part of the region provisioning process. You can find this region identifier in the OCI Dedicated Region cloud management console section on the Manage Regions page. Note that service and console routes aren’t advertised to the internet, so please make sure you have the in-region Oracle root name server configured in your network to reach Oracle’s cloud services. For more details, please consult your Oracle support representative.

How do I connect my on-premises systems to a VCN (virtual cloud network) in OCI Dedicated Region?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect enables customers to create a dedicated, private connection between on-premises systems and OCI. With OCI FastConnect private peering, customers can extend their existing infrastructure into a VCN on OCI. Communication across the connection is with IPv4 private addresses.

Can I run Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on OCI Dedicated Region?

Yes. You can run Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on OCI Dedicated Region. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution includes VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and HCX. Customers have the same level of visibility and access (SSH to hypervisor, configure hosts, edit vSAN settings, and so on) as with their on-premises VMware cluster. Please visit the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution page for more details.

Can I centrally govern workloads across Oracle commercial public cloud regions and my OCI Dedicated Region?

Oracle commercial public cloud regions and OCI Dedicated Region are in separate realms. This means that they aren’t connected and currently can’t be managed using a single console. OCI Dedicated Region is managed using its own console, which provides a very similar experience to the Oracle commercial public cloud regions.