Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region is a private copy of the full set of OCI services – or, where more appropriate, a subset – delivered from inside the customer's data centre.

While public cloud is suitable for many organisations and workloads, OCI Dedicated Region helps meet the latency, data residency, and data sovereignty requirements that may prevent the use of public cloud.

OCI Dedicated Region now requires requires 60-75% less data centre space (starting at around 20 racks) and power, and the minimum total spend has been reduced to $1 million a year, making it available to a wider range of customers.

Customers can "pick a bit of everything," said Oracle APAC senior vice president of technology Christopher Chelliah, for example by running most workloads in a Dedicated Region with some processing carried out on Oracle's rugged edge devices at remote locations such as mines or ships.

Or systems can be developed in the OCI public cloud, then deployed in a Dedicated Region.

The commercial agreements make it easy to move workloads around, he added, and means just the right amount of OCI hardware is installed in the customer's data centre.

According to Oracle, commercial and public sector customers are adopting OCI Dedicated Region to host applications and data that require strict data residency, control, and security; or that must remain in specific locations for low-latency connectivity and data-intensive processing.

As with Oracle's 38 public cloud regions (set to increase to 44 by the end of 2022), Dedicated Regions can be extended into hybrid architectures using Roving Edge Infrastructure.

Customers using OCI Dedicated Region include Nomura Research Institute, Australian Data Centres, Vodafone, NEOM, and the Bangladesh government.

Vodafone is to use OCI Dedicated Region to modernise its European IT infrastructure and accelerate its cloud transition.

This includes its mission-critical OSS and BSS systems, including CRM and order management, and will enable Vodafone to build new cloud-based applications faster, and then launch them in multiple markets at the same time.

OCI Dedicated Region will be deployed in Vodafone's main data centres.

The arrangement will enable it to dynamically augment and scale services in multiple geographies according to changing business requirements, thus meeting data residency regulations as well as reducing costs.

"As Vodafone focuses on growth, data is key to how we evolve our business, build new capabilities and innovate to meet the needs of our customers. Our collaboration with Oracle supports our vision of becoming a technology communications company," said Vodafone chief digital and IT officer Scott Petty.

"The agreement enables Oracle to bring its entire portfolio of cloud services directly into Vodafone data centres. This includes the same architecture, software, services and control plane used in OCI public cloud. The flexibility offered by OCI enables us to build a robust, secure, and extensible cloud platform in our own data centres, while also providing the operational agility and scalability required to support the growth and diversification of our business."

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executive vice president Clay Magouyrk said "Telecom companies are reimagining their business models to innovate and monetise new opportunities at speed and at scale.

"Vodafone is at the forefront of this thinking, and we are excited to bring the power of OCI to Vodafone's data centres to support the company and its partners as they fast-track this vision and deliver the next generation of connected services."

In related news, Oracle is previewing OCI Compute Cloud@Customer, a rack-scale solution for environments are too small to take advantage of OCI Dedicated Region.

Compute Cloud@Customer provides OCI-compatible compute, storage, and networking in the customer's data centre, fully managed as a service and offered on a consumption model.

It will join Exadata Cloud@Customer.