ORACLE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE EXPANDS ITS CAPABILITIES WITH ARM
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
ORACLE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE EXPANDS
ITS CAPABILITIES WITH ARM
INTRODUCTION
The modern business lives in the cloud. Newer businesses born in the cloud have a
distinct advantage over more mature organizations regarding market adaptability and
agility. As a result, larger and more mature organizations are in the throes of digital
transformation projects that enable quicker "time to insight."
Time to value and cost are two critical metrics used to determine the success of such
digital transformation projects. Invariably, these two measurements drive (greater)
adoption of "the cloud" for an organization fending off competition from upstarts.
A natural result of cloud adoption is the widespread use of cloud-native architectures as
a means of application development and deployment. While newer companies have
been built with a cloud-first mindset, more mature organizations look to refactor and
rearchitect line-of-business (LoB) and other mission-critical applications in a cloud-
native architecture.
Because of this cloudification, providers like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) have
become a strong consideration for companies of all sizes looking to adopt and leverage
newer technologies more quickly and cost-effectively. And such companies are
increasingly finding Arm-based instances to be a lower-cost, highly performant
alternative. In the case of OCI, these instances are referred to as Ampere A1, and the
partner platform is Ampere Computing's Altra processors.
This brief will look at Arm’s growing cloud footprint, and how a rich ecosystem helped
drive platform preference in the cloud-native datacenter. Further, this brief will pull back
the cover on OCI’s Ampere A1 compute platform. It will examine target workloads and
look more deeply at Oracle’s embracing of Arm and its ecosystem to drive performance
and price competitive offerings to its cloud customers.
Page 1 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategySETTING THE STAGE – MODERN WORKLOADS REQUIRE MODERN
ARCHITECTURE
The modern business – whether born in the cloud or digitally transformed – relies on
application architectures aligned to and designed for the cloud. The traditional three-
tiered LoB applications driving the business are being refactored and rearchitected to
take advantage of inherent cloud-native openness, mobility, and security.
As businesses embraced the cloud as a natural and vital extension of the datacenter,
Oracle responded with OCI's launch in 2016. Five years later, OCI operates in 30
regions around the globe (with more planned), offering over 65 infrastructure and
platform services.
As application architectures evolve, so must underlying infrastructure. The notion of a
single architecture and infrastructure platform to which all software and workloads must
adhere is long gone. Rather, the market has shifted to an open software ecosystem
aligned to the expectation of cloud consumers that applications and workloads “just
work” on the underlying infrastructure. This expectation has led to a diversity of compute
architectures tailored to the needs of applications and workloads. And out of this
evolution, Arm and its ecosystem of silicon and platform partners have emerged as a
clear and viable alternative with a price and performance advantage for many cloud-
native workloads.
As OCI evolved, the company understood the dynamic of an open platform that could
meet the expectations of the business wanting to drive the best performance for each
application individually – from high-end data analytics to running containerized
environments in an isolated fashion. The result? The launch of the Ampere A1 compute
platform based on Altra processors.
The selection of Ampere’s Altra seems obvious for Oracle, with its team of industry
leaders with deep experience and knowledge of the cloud datacenter. Altra is built on
highly dense, single-threaded cores architected on the Arm Neoverse N1 architecture.
ARM – OPEN ARCHITECTURE FOR THE CLOUD
The cloud ushered in the age of software-defined everything. Organizations look at the
cloud as a virtual extension of the datacenter. Take a workload, deploy to the cloud, and
it “just works.” No thought of microarchitecture. No concerns around performance.
Security? A given.
Page 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyIt is this very “cloud-first” mindset that makes the Arm hardware and software
ecosystems so compelling to cloud providers and businesses alike. To better
understand this dynamic, it is necessary to draw the connection from the needs of
business technology consumers to the CPU and microarchitecture.
• Business professionals’ technical competencies range from data scientists to
embedded DevOps to marketing professionals looking to run detailed reports.
Despite the differences in these users, the needs are consistent – access to
data, technology, and services that can speed the pace of insights, innovation,
and business.
• The independent software vendor (ISV) community that services today’s
business must in turn be open. The software must be able to deliver the features
and capabilities that are in demand. It must also be architected to rapidly evolve
with the needs of the market, not through a patchwork of bolted-on modules and
updates, but openly, and must account for third-party integration.
• The design of today’s workloads and applications relies on hardware platforms
that can drive optimized performance. Artificial intelligence, data analytics, data
management solutions, for example, are all improved with specialized hardware
designs. And ISVs will look for such platforms in which to deliver optimized
solutions for consumption.
• For infrastructure providers to deliver workload-optimized platforms, a robust
silicon ecosystem of designers must be able to quickly develop CPUs to meet
these needs. The traditional three-year design cycle for a CPU will not be able to
keep pace with the rate of innovation.
This is the strength of Arm. The company’s model is based on an annual innovation
cycle whereby architectural designs and IP blocks enable partners to rapidly build
platforms tailored for workloads and industries. Simply put, rather than having to tailor
software to hardware, potentially limiting its capabilities or performance, solutions
providers can unlock hardware to fully support software. This is the true spirit of
software-defined infrastructure.
Arm has methodically developed a silicon, compute, and software ecosystem that rivals
that of its x86 competitors in the datacenter space over the past several years. What
began as a startup-like effort from the likes of Linaro in 2010 has turned into first-citizen
status with open-source projects spanning the workloads that power the modern
business.
Page 3 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyFIGURE 1: ARM ECOSYSTEM
Source: Moor Insights & Strategy
We expect IT organizations will continue to further embrace Arm-based servers and
cloud services to power the mission-critical workloads that power the business. Moor
Insights & Strategy (MI&S) believes the Arm-based ecosystem will usher in a return to
the multi-architectural datacenter, not a single architecture around which every ISV
must design solutions.
AMPERE ALTRA – A QUICK OVERVIEW
To better articulate the value of OCI’s Ampere A1 compute, it is important to describe
what makes Ampere's Altra CPU unique. From a specification perspective, Ampere has
a lot to boast about:
• Eighty (80) single-threaded Neoverse N1 cores per socket running at up to 3.0
GHz (per core)
o These cores can be dedicated per virtual machine (VM), providing the
isolation necessary to drive best performance and VM integrity.
o In multi-threaded cores, often found in other CPU architectures, shared
resources can lead to performance degradation as shared resources face
contention, often known as the “noisy neighbor” effect.
• One (1) MB of dedicated L2 cache per core (80MB total), keeping those 80 cores
working efficiently
Page 4 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & Strategy• One hundred twenty-eight (128) lanes of PCIe 4 per socket (196 lanes in a two-
socket system), enabling more storage and application accelerators at peak
speeds
• A 7nm manufacturing process that means smaller packaging, better
performance, and lower power consumption
FIGURE 2: OCI AMPERE A1 INSTANCE PERFORMANCE:
Source: Arm
There are inherent benefits that result from cores that are not hyperthreaded. Core
performance is deterministic and scales linearly with core count. This is beneficial for
both high core count, scale-up applications as well as for provisioning multiple lower
core count VMs that scale out. As a cloud provider, the ability to support service-level
agreements is more effortless. And customers see the result of this architecture as the
potential performance and security issues associated with "noisy and disruptive
neighbors" are eliminated.
WHAT IS ARM NEOVERSE?
Just as it is important to detail the capabilities of Altra to truly appreciate OCI’s Ampere
A1 instances, it is critical to understand why designing around Arm Neoverse makes
Altra unique.
Neoverse is an architectural family from Arm designed from scratch for the cloud, edge,
and datacenter. Whereas other architectures may carry a lot of legacy support,
Page 5 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyNeoverse was Arm's first "infrastructure-first" design. What makes Neoverse so unique
is how silicon designers such as Ampere can take this architecture and design tailored
solutions for a market segment or customer. In this case, Altra was explicitly designed
to enable performant, reliable, and secure compute for the cloud datacenter.
Neoverse has three architectural designs in its family that span the power-performance
continuum. This enables chip companies to more efficiently design and manufacture
CPUs, as discussed previously. Below is a quick overview of each:
• V-Series is the architectural design that focuses on maximum performance.
High-performance computing (HPC) and other workloads that value raw
performance over power or packaging size benefit from Arm's V-Series.
• N-Series strikes a balance between performance and power. Arm positions N-
Series as its scale-out performance architecture. This architecture targets silicon
designers wanting to deliver solutions to the cloud and hyperscale space and for
networking use cases like switches and SmartNICs. Indeed, the uptake thus far
in the cloud has been based on this architecture.
• E-Series architecture sits on the power efficiency end of the performance-power
continuum. It is a more efficient microarchitecture focused on throughput versus
the compute focus one would find in the N-Series and V-Series architectures. If
one were to think HPC for V-Series and hyperscale compute for the N-Series
architecture, low-power 5G data plane would be a good usage model for the E-
Series.
FIGURE 3: NEOVERSE PLATFORM COMPARISON
Source: Moor Insights & Strategy
Page 6 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyOCI AMPERE A1 IS CLOUD-READY
Oracle makes a provocative claim about OCI, positioning it as being cloud-first in design
and build-out. The creation of OCI and the design of its cloud offerings did not involve
legacy datacenter or legacy infrastructure business. Put simply, OCI was designed for
the cloud-native environment, from the ground up. While this claim is bold, it has merit.
FIGURE 4: A1 WORKLOAD SUPPORT
Source: Moor Insights & Strategy
The design of Altra makes it ideal for several workloads that organizations have found
to be strong candidates for the cloud. Based on performance profiles, MI&S sees A1 as
well-positioned for the following workloads in OCI:
• Both VM and container-based cloud-native applications that thrive on platforms
with dense single-threaded cores. Such an architecture enables customers to
deploy microservices at scale without sacrificing performance. The isolation of
cores in A1 further enhances the inherent security built into a containerized
architecture.
• Bare metal servers with up to 160 cores per server, 1TB of memory, and
100Gb/s of bandwidth for workloads that require isolation, visibility, and complete
control.
Page 7 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & Strategy• Performance-hungry workloads such as machine learning (ML) inferencing,
encoding, and HPC. Cores with high clock speeds tied to rich, dedicated cache
deliver the single-threaded performance required to process instructions faster.
• Database workloads that benefit from A1’s linear scalability and caching
capabilities, combined with its memory capacity. In particular, in-memory
databases such as Redis should perform well.
• Web-scale workloads in use by companies of all sizes. MI&S sees A1 as a strong
candidate for developers and organizations looking to deliver SaaS-based
offerings to the market due to its performance capabilities and cost. Oracle
appears to be building a deep developer ecosystem through on-ramp promotions
to enable the quick adoption of A1.
WHAT SEPARATES AMPERE A1 FROM THE CROWD?
There are three fundamental elements by which any cloud provider can be measured -
cost, flexibility, and openness. We believe Oracle delivers on all three with A1.
A1 is the first cloud instance MI&S has seen with a penny per core hour in the industry.
More interestingly, this offering is a penny per core hour for highly performant cores, not
a de-featured instance.
Another attractive feature of A1 is a customer’s ability to shape virtual environments
tailored to its specific needs, from 1-80 cores (known as OCPU) and up to 512GB of
DDR4 RAM. This flexibility enables a model by which customers are paying for actual
resources consumed.
Contrast this with other billing models where a customer orders a sized instance that is
usually calculated to support peak usage. At the end of a billing cycle, that size is paid
for, even as unused compute capacity is left on the table.
Finally, Oracle has seemingly embraced a strict adherence to openness with OCI. For a
company that has found its success by selling a proprietary database management
platform, this is especially striking. It seems to speak to an understanding of the
changing marketing dynamics and a willingness to evolve and listen to its customers.
For example, environments such as Oracle Kubernetes Environment (OKE) and Oracle
Java remain true to their open-source project and are maintained as such. Applications
for cloud deployment require no customer modification or refactoring and no specialized
Page 8 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & Strategysyntax for building and deploying containers. Likewise, database distributions such as
Redis and Oracle MySQL maintain integrity to the associated open-source project.
OCI Ampere A1 will be offered to customers on-premises as a consumption-based
offering through Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer offering. We believe this
is the simplest implementation of a hybrid cloud. The company appears to be fully
committed to on-prem cloud through this offering. It essentially delivers, manages, and
updates the entire Oracle Cloud – all services, compute offerings, and data
management services.
Oracle seems to be committed to growing the Arm ecosystem, and to help jump-start
developers, Oracle Cloud Free Tier includes a generous capacity of A1 shapes (4 A1
cores and 24GB of memory) that are always free for developers to start building
applications. This is quite an incentive that should help grow the OCI community.
IN CLOSING
As modern businesses evolve and utilize a blend of on-prem and off-prem resources to
drive business initiatives (while reducing costs and time to value), they should strongly
consider Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for three reasons:
• The company has breadth and depth of products and expertise in enabling data-
driven companies.
• OCI was designed, developed, and launched as a cloud-first offering.
• Its commitment to embracing openness, combined with its catalog of services,
makes it a one-stop cloud with an extremely easy on-ramp.
While OCI offers a range of solutions and services, its Ampere A1 instances based on
Ampere’s Altra CPU are uniquely compelling due to the price-performance leadership,
the flexibility of instance sizing, and its commitment to the open-source software
ecosystem built around Arm.
Oracle's embrace of Arm to drive its next-generation cloud speaks to the validity of Arm
in the enterprise market. Long gone are the days of proprietary hardware supporting a
proprietary software stack that increases in cost and complexity over time. Arm
Neoverse V-, N-, and E-Series are worthy of serious consideration in powering the
enterprise – whether in the cloud or on-premises.
Page 9 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & Strategy• For more information on OCI’s Ampere A1 Platform, please visit here.
• For more information on Ampere Altra, please visit here.
• For more information on Arm Neoverse, please visit here.
Page 10 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyIMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PAPER
CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy
Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy
PUBLISHER
Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy
INQUIRIES
Contact us if you would like to discuss this report, and Moor Insights & Strategy will respond promptly.
CITATIONS
This paper can be cited by accredited press and analysts but must be cited in-context, displaying the
author's name, author's title, and "Moor Insights & Strategy." Non-press and non-analysts must receive
prior written permission by Moor Insights & Strategy for any citations.
LICENSING
This document, including any supporting materials, is owned by Moor Insights & Strategy. This
publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or shared in any form without Moor Insights & Strategy's
prior written permission.
DISCLOSURES
This paper was commissioned by Arm. Moor Insights & Strategy provides research, analysis, advising,
and consulting to many high-tech companies mentioned in this paper. No employees at the firm hold any
equity positions with any companies cited in this document.
DISCLAIMER
The information presented in this document is for informational purposes only and may contain technical
inaccuracies, omissions, and typographical errors. Moor Insights & Strategy disclaims all warranties as to
the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors,
omissions, or inadequacies in such information. This document consists of the opinions of Moor Insights
& Strategy and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject
to change without notice.
Moor Insights & Strategy provides forecasts and forward-looking statements as directional indicators and
not as precise predictions of future events. While our forecasts and forward-looking statements represent
our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forecasts and
forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of publication for this document.
Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any
revision to these forecasts and forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.
©2021 Moor Insights & Strategy. Company and product names are used for informational purposes only
and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Page 11 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands Its Capabilities With Arm May 2021
Copyright ©2021 Moor Insights & StrategyYou can also read
