Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) got its start more than 10 years ago, as service providers made extra computing, storage, and network capacity available to customers on a subscription basis. These remote-technology offerings gave organizations an alternative to provisioning, installing, and maintaining their own IT infrastructure and paved the way for individuals, companies, and governments to tap into unlimited data center assets.

Those first-generation cloud offerings have become extremely popular—but today’s customers want more. More power. More versatility. More control.

Oracle has responded with next-generation IaaS offerings that combine the elasticity and utility of the public cloud with the granular control, security, and predictability of on-premises infrastructure.

“One of the key ideas of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure—initially introduced as Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services—is to meet customers where they are,” says Marc Levy, an architect and vice president of software development at Oracle. “If they want to move their applications as they are, they can do that. And they can do that because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports a wide variety of compute—from virtual machines to bare metal servers to engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata—all in the same cloud infrastructure. So customers can use the familiar infrastructure patterns they use on premises—for example, a very high-performance engineered system—and they can also adopt cloud-native patterns.”

Building on Raw Power

This type of flexibility and power is perfect for companies such as Zenotech, an Oracle partner that supplies cloud-based solutions for computational fluid dynamics. Zenotech helps engineers at aerospace companies, automotive companies, and civil engineering firms simulate airflow over airplane wings, airflow around buildings, and similar types of complex engineering challenges. Its software platform and cloud brokerage service, known as Elastic Private Interactive Cloud (EPIC), enables customers to initiate and scale these complex jobs within a high-performance computing environment. Today, many of those jobs run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.

“We invested in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because it includes some of the latest hardware available anywhere in the world,” says David Standingford, director and cofounder at Zenotech. “By linking directly with Oracle infrastructure, our EPIC platform, which is designed to match elements in complex, heterogeneous workflows with the optimal hardware, will have unmatched performance.”

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