ANZ treats Exadata as a path to Oracle cloud

ANZ Banking Group is treating an Oracle Exadata hardware deployment as an entry point to potentially hosting payments-oriented and other workloads in the cloud.

Head of payments support and site reliability engineering Jason Barnes-Wo told an Oracle forum at the end of last year that the bank had deployed Exadata initially to process transactions run over the new payments platform (NPP).

Exadata is a combined hardware and software platform optimised to run Oracle databases.

Barnes-Wo said that real-time payments platforms such as the NPP “are popping up in various geographies around the world”.

“As the changing nature of payments drives progression forward, we’re seeing a much larger number of payments come through, they’re by orders of magnitude smaller, and hence there’s a higher volume of them coming through,” he said.

“Clearly there are increased volumes in our systems, and Exadata is really pivotal to us providing that additional capacity, keeping our resilience high and transforming our landscape so we can access cloud architectures of the future.”

Although explicitly deployed for site reliability engineering (SRE) and performance purposes for ANZ’s adoption of NPP, it was confirmed that the Exadata environment would be multi-tenanted, though it was not clear what other workloads would also use the infrastructure.

However, Barnes-Wo said that more broadly, the adoption of Exadata was positioned internally as a long-term path to transform some “legacy workloads” and make them portable enough to run on on-premises hardware (“private cloud”) or an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.

“Typically what you see from other platforms is that even in a private cloud setup onsite, those environments are distinct from what you find in the cloud, whereas with Exadata it’s a lot more transferable,” he said.

“It’s a real entry point into going onto the cloud for us, and that really did drive our decisioning around how we de-risk our path onto more cloud compliant platforms so then we can step up our investment and opportunities in those settings.”

Barnes-Wo pointed specifically to the future option to host some workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the vendor’s IaaS offering.

“If you look at the growth of OCI over the past couple of years … at the beginning of this journey for us we could see it coming but it wasnt one of the main clouds,” he said.

“Now there’s some real significant deployments on OCI, you’re seeing some real big players taking advantage of the ability to do this work on-prem first, and then without really having to do a huge amount to the operating model that you’re running, you can move it into a cloud setting quite easily.”

Barnes-Wo said that ANZ had worked on the Exadata environment with Accenture Enkitec Group, a specialist in engineered systems and Oracle that Accenture purchased back in 2014.