Oracle is claiming an industry-first by integrating its Storage Cloud with the operating system of the ZFS High Performance Storage Appliance.

The company says that this will be the first time that a public cloud provider, at scale, has been able to integrate its cloud services with its on-premises, high performance NAS storage systems.

The idea is that its ZFS Cloud software will enable organisations to move data and/or applications to the cloud in order to optimise value and savings, the company said. These benefits will be complimented by there no longer being a need for external cloud gateways, so in theory the business can avoid the costs of software licenses and cloud access licenses.

Big Red say’s that these common “cloud entrance taxes” that are charged by legacy on-premises vendors for the right to access the public cloud from their infrastructure platforms are removed and that an 87% total cost of ownership saving was made. 

What all of this means is that users won’t have to do their own on-premises to public cloud environment, along with all the challenges involved in that such as managing different security requirements for each environment.

Mark Peters, Practice Director & Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “With its ZFS Cloud, Oracle simultaneously challenges not only public cloud providers that cannot deliver on-premises, high-performance storage systems, but also traditional hardware vendors that lack truly integrated public clouds.”

Read more: Is Oracle looking to acquire Accenture?

Big Red says that its customers can use Cloud Converged Storage for elastic application storage, back-up and recovery, development, testing and many other things.

In essence, applications can use data both in on-premises Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances in the Oracle Storage Cloud without making any application changes.

What makes this release unique from the other big public cloud players is that Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft don’t offer high-performance on-premises storage. While on the on-premises storage provider side, they typically don’t have public cloud services.

This means that any on-premises customer has to buy external cloud gateways, or pay “cloud entrance taxes” as Big Red puts it.