Oracle and Rai Way together to support ever more organisations on the path to AI adoption

The joint initiative aims to support the digitization of Italian companies by extending the ability to take advantage of the performance and security of Oracle AI technologies even within Rai Way's edge data centres

Milan and Rome, 25 July 2024 - Oracle and Rai Way, a digital infrastructure operator and service provider for media content distribution, announce their intention to collaborate to support Italian companies on the path to adopting artificial intelligence by combining Oracle's latest generation database systems and solutions with Rai Way's distributed “colocation” services (i.e. pay-per-use services for hosting servers and storage devices of companies), maximising reliability, scalability, sustainability and security of the solutions.

More specifically, the agreement between the two companies allows Oracle to expand its AI proposal to its corporate customers, offering them the possibility of using, in Rai Way's data centres, the most innovative versions of its engineered systems, database solutions, and disaster recovery technologies and Rai Way to enrich its “colocation” proposal by offering, in its infrastructures, also the availability of the various OCI-Oracle Cloud Infrastructure distributed cloud options.

By bringing AI algorithms closer to the point where the data resides, the aim is to meet the evolving needs of many organisations, which need to bring their business applications as close as possible to the source of the data, resulting in shorter response times and greater security.

The agreement is part of Rai Way's current diversification strategy, which consists in building a national and carrier-neutral network of high quality data centres in Italy, distributed and interconnected through more than 6,000 km of proprietary fibre optic backbone, divided between edge infrastructures - located and designed to meet the needs of proximity and low latency, even in areas of Italy currently under-served - and a hyper-scale data centre, creating an architecture that enables the computing continuum, i.e. the ability to use data where necessary.

For its part, Oracle, as part of its AI strategy, aims to give its customers more flexibility in choosing how and where to take advantage of AI technologies, even away from major metropolitan areas.

"The collaboration with Rai Way gives us the opportunity to bring to even more Italian companies all the possibilities of innovation linked to our technologies and services, and to contribute together to the mitigation of the 'digital divide' in some under-served regions", explains Carlota Alvarez, CEO and Country Manager of Oracle Italy. "We want to offer customers the chance to leverage full AI functions with the performance, security and convenience of our technologies in a variety of ways so as to meet their strategic application management needs, including those that need ultra-low data latency and local processing capabilities".

"The partnership between Rai Way and Oracle makes possible to combine the advantages of a distributed platform of interconnected, high-capacity data centres, with access to state-of-the-art cloud and edge computing services", says Roberto Cecatto, Chief Executive Officer of Rai Way. “This collaboration not only provides access to services closer to the end user, but also increases data security and promotes sustainability, contributing substantially to the digitisation of the country".

An arrangement with high development potential

One of the possible development directions of the collaboration between Oracle and Rai Way concerns the area of cybersecurity and disaster recovery. The particular geographical distribution of Rai Way's network of edge data centres, located in less frequented areas than the main cloud infrastructure hubs in the country, adds a further layer of protection against any attempts by cyber-criminals to locate data geographically.

The Oracle offering available in Rai Way's data centres includes, among others, the engineered Exadata Database Machine - equipped with the latest version of the “24ai” system software, which allows the artificial intelligence services offered by the new Oracle Database 23ai to be combined with a market-leading high-performance platform; Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, a key technology for defending against ransomware attacks on Oracle databases, which makes it possible to create protected areas in which an exact replica of the customer's database can be kept safe from risk, inspected and made immutable to be immediately available for recovery in the event of a cyber-attack, thus making it ideal for cyber-attack protection and resilience services and advanced disaster recovery; Oracle Database Appliance, a highly automated, ultra-low environmental impact system optimised for AI applications of small and medium-sized companies.

Learn more about the technologies mentioned and Oracle's distributed cloud:

Hybrid cloud and multicloud: Oracle also offers its cloud services on-premise, at the customer's data centre, via Exadata Cloud@Customer and Compute Cloud@Customer; such solutions have already been implemented in more than 60 countries worldwide. Exadata systems hosted at Microsoft's data centres enable integrations with Cloud Azure, with solutions such as Database@Azure, This and other options - such as MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Microsoft Azure, Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure and Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud - enabling customers to combine key functionalities of different clouds.

Exadata 24ai: Exadata System Software 24ai provides full support for Oracle Database 23ai, which also includes new SQL offload capabilities to accelerate vector search for Artificial Intelligence, taking advantage of Exadata's scalable architecture. More information is available in this blog post on Oracle's website

Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance: The Recovery Appliance includes features that make it inherently resilient to ransomware attacks, maintaining data recovery capabilities even in the most complex situations. More information is available in this blog post on Oracle's website

Public cloud: Oracle's commercial cloud regions serve organisations of all sizes, including those requiring strict EU sovereignty controls. Here you can find a complete and constantly updated list of cloud regions of Oracle.

Dedicated cloud: Customers can run all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud services in their own data centres with OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC), while partners can resell OCI cloud services and customise the experience using Oracle Alloy. Oracle also operates separate government clouds for the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia and isolated cloud regions for national security purposes for instance in the United States, as well as two Sovereign Cloud Regions for the European Union. The latter provide a complete cloud and AI stack that customers can implement as EU Sovereign Cloud.

Additional information on Rai Way Data Centres:

All Rai Way data centres are built to the latest design and construction standards and are all ANSI-TIA 942B rating 3 certified, ensuring reliability and sustainability for its customers.