Oracle unveils Acceleron upgrades to boost OCI cloud networking

Oracle has announced the release of new networking capabilities within its Oracle Acceleron suite for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), intended to accelerate data movement and provide more predictable, low-latency, high-bandwidth connections for a variety of workloads.

The suite includes enhancements in dedicated network fabrics, converged network interface cards (NICs), zero-trust packet routing at the host level, and multi-planar network designs. These capabilities are being offered to customers without additional charges.

Oracle Acceleron

Oracle Acceleron's software architecture is engineered to integrate advanced networking, storage, and security functionality across a range of supported hardware. This approach is intended to streamline complexity by collapsing multiple technology layers into a programmable base, aiming to improve both performance and security while keeping costs down.

With the new features, customers can expect encrypted data transmission at line rate, extremely low network latency, up to double the previous network processing capacity and storage input/output operations per second (IOPS), and resilient, intent-driven security measures enforced directly at the host machine. These advances are designed to support any workload running on OCI, including large-scale web applications and AI model training.

Clay Magouyrk, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle, stated:

Our customers want cloud infrastructure to help them innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and scale with confidence. For more than a decade, Oracle has led foundational cloud networking innovation, and these latest advances extend Oracle Acceleron to deliver uncompromised performance, scale, and security for any cloud workload.

Key features breakdown

Oracle highlights three areas of advancement in the Acceleron platform: fabric network architecture, fabric accelerators, and host network accelerators.

In the area of fabric network architecture, Oracle is introducing a dedicated fabric network approach that gives customers predictable low-latency and high-bandwidth connectivity at a variety of scales. By using isolated and performance-optimised network fabrics, this architecture is designed to support demanding workloads such as Oracle Exadata, high-performance computing, and large artificial intelligence or machine learning clusters. The company is moving away from traditional three-tier network architectures in favour of these custom-built fabrics optimised for throughput and low latency.

The multi-planar networking design allows each customer NIC to connect to multiple, separate network planes. Should one plane experience an issue, traffic can be shifted instantly to another plane, enhancing resiliency and lowering latency. Oracle reports that this configuration reduces bottlenecks and prevents application stalls or restarts, helping workloads remain on schedule.

Fabric and host acceleration

Oracle's new fabric accelerator removes unnecessary network intermediaries and hops, allowing data traffic to follow a more direct path between hosts and destinations. This approach is intended to reduce latency, improve efficiency, and reduce variability and bottlenecks across network tiers, while also bolstering security.

At the host level, Oracle is introducing a converged NIC that enables the partitioning of a SmartNIC into both customer and provider planes. This development supports storage acceleration through NVMe over TCP, allows for encryption at line-rate, and enables patching of bare-metal NICs. The converged NIC is reported to provide up to twice the throughput of previous approaches, without the cost or performance drawbacks of running dual NIC designs.

Zero-Trust Packet Routing (ZPR) has been enhanced to provide least-privilege enforcement at the initial packet level, simplifying security policy management and making it less dependent on network topology. New enhancements also allow for private service access to sensitive endpoints and use deny-based identity and access management policies to block unauthorised inspection paths at the host.

Industry partnerships

Industry partners also commented on Oracle's updates to Acceleron, emphasising ongoing collaborations in the field of cloud networking and security.

Ken Duda, President and Chief Technology Officer, Arista Networks, said:

Arista has a long‐standing collaboration with Oracle, and we're pleased to continue to pioneer innovation and progress for customers embodied by Oracle Acceleron. As the industry looks to the next generation of AI networking infrastructure, Arista's differentiated network platforms with rich software suites are ready to deliver customer value through Oracle Acceleron.

Forrest Norrod, Executive Vice President and General Manager for the Data Centre Solutions Business Group at AMD, also commented:

AMD and Oracle share a deep commitment to delivering high performance and robust security in cloud computing. OCI launched with AMD Pensando DPUs, and we've collaborated to deliver breakthrough performance and security for all workloads. We look forward to continued innovation in Oracle Acceleron with converged NICs powered by AMD Pensando DPUs launching early next year.

Oracle's introduction of these new cloud networking features aims to offer customers enhanced performance, increased efficiency, and reinforced security within their cloud infrastructure deployments while maintaining consistent pricing.