First Oracle Data Center certification

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Oracle published a new certification in September, and it has nothing to do with SQL. Oracle Data Center Operations Foundations Associate (1Z0-3000) is about the building itself: power, cooling, monitoring and what to do when an alarm goes off at night. It is the first exam on a brand new Oracle Data Center track, and so far it is the only one there.

So I took the course and passed the exam. For a database person it was a fresh perspective on how a data center really works, all the things below the database I never had to think about.

The course takes about 5 hours. It is a Foundations exam, but do not expect the usual walk in the park (I wrote about the other ones in Why bother with Oracle Foundation(s) certifications?). Some questions were more challenging, many of them had multiple correct options, and you need at least 80% to pass. So it was a bit harder than the other Foundations exams I took. But it was fun.

Building like crazy

Oracle is turning into a landlord for AI: you rent compute, storage and GPUs, and Oracle owns the buildings, the power and the machines.

And it is building data centers like crazy. The new campuses are measured in gigawatts, not racks: Abilene and Shackelford County in Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Project Jupiter in New Mexico, which makes its own power with fuel cells. In one quarter this summer Oracle brought 850 MW of new capacity online and delivered more than 300 000 GPUs. The direction is clear.

Every one of those buildings needs people who understand power backups, cooling and monitoring, and who know what to do when one of them fails. So a Data Center learning path makes perfect sense, and I expect more exams to follow.

Worth a few evenings

Whatever happens next, the buildings are real and somebody has to run them. You will read the next region outage email a bit differently.

If you know someone who keeps saying the cloud is just somebody else's computer, send them this one.