Oracle Cloud Computing

I wanted to update the blog about Oracle Cloud Computing last week. Due to my new OEM (Oracle Enterprise Manager) 11g engagement at New Jersey and the regular workout schedule (Lost 4 pounds in the last 2 weeks), I had no time to do that. Here we go!

There was a lot of buzz about Oracle Cloud Computing approach at Oracle Open World. It is quite natural to think that Oracle is late to enter into Cloud Computing and Of course they are late. But no one should underestimate the persistence of Larry Ellison (Let’s not forget, he is the CEO of a major US corporation for more than 35 years).

While other Cloud providers depend upon the IT Service providers for the hardware and software, Oracle naturally has it all (Java, Solaris, Fusion Middleware and a Database). The recent ground breaking Oracle technologies ExaLogic and Exadata will be an added value to the Oracle Cloud Computing Initiative.

The problem Oracle faces today is not the technology for Cloud but the Governance. They lack knowledgeable Cloud Architects and Managers. The best bet for Oracle is to buy a Cloud Computing Company and integrate their resources and Governance into their technology stack.

Oracle could consider going after Work day, Inc which was started by David Duffield and buy the company. Due to the limited and focused nature (ERP hosting Cloud) of Work day, Inc, I suspect Larry would not pursue this route. Larry doesn’t want to go after salesforce.com, who wants another CRM?

As I was typing this update, I just got into LinkedIn and saw that Oracle acquires RightNow, Inc for 1.5 Billion dollar. RightNow is a .NET based Cloud Provider and I am curious to see how Oracle is going to handle it this new inclusion. They can replace it with Oracle Fusion Middleware sooner and hopefully they can retain the right resources. Let’s wait and see how Oracle takes this forward! The NO SQL based databases could be a challenge for sometime but no one is going to migrate their databases to NO SQL model overnight. We all know Oracle Fusion Middleware rocks!!! I rarely see people these days who talk about IBM WebSphere.

I am confident Oracle will be a big winner in this Cloud market space in the coming days. I have faith in Larry Ellison’s marketing model, as always.

Have a good week!

Grid to Cloud - Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

Oracle announced the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c at Oracle Open World last week at San Francisco. While majority of products from Oracle ends with letter ‘g’, the new product release ends with letter ‘c’. c stands for Cloud. Let’s see how Oracle will handle the remaining ‘g’s in the coming days.

Richard Sarwal, Head of product development at Oracle says "OEM12c is quite a transformatory product. It has about 200 major features into this release of the product and over 500 enhancement requests were done."

Due to the enormous attention OEM gains these days among Oracle customers, I am eager to pen a couple of lines on this upgrade. I will soon install this product and update the blog with screen shots.

Let’s see some of the new cool features of OEM 12c.

First, Cloud! OEM 12c provides complete cloud lifecycle management and Integrated cloud stack management.

Complete Cloud life cycle management consists of

• Dynamic Resource Modeling for Cloud
• Prerequisite Check
• Consolidation Planning
• Resource and Capacity Planning
• Bare Metal to Cloud Ready
• Application Modeling for Cloud
• Dynamic Resource and Power Management
• Self Service Provisioning
• Metering and Chargeback

Using OEM 12c console, Administrators can

• · Schedule Oracle VM availability for power management
• · Migrate Guest VM's to other hosts
• · View Cloud Infrastructure graphically
• · Policy based control for Shared Resources
• · Allocate Quotas
• · Catalogue of virtual machines, databases, Applications, OS
• · Automatic target discovery

Apart from the above Cloud and Virtualization support functionality, there are several new features related to Frame work, Incident Management, Monitoring and Diagnostics. See below my observations

1) Management features for Oracle Products now provided via plug-ins

2) Administrator can customize the look and feel of OEM 12c console to meet the specific needs

3) Administration of Management Agents as group

4) Integration with Oracle BI Publisher to provide various kind of reports

5) Token based Authentication for Web Services

6) A new wizard to create database instance, RAC based instances

7) DBA's can use OEM 12c console to maintain the settings of Oracle database and file system backups.

8) Compare functionality

9) WebLogic Administrators can create/clone domains, deploy applications through OEM 12c Console

10) Performance Monitoring for Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition

11) Composite Application dashboard

12) Middleware Diagnostic Advisor for WebLogic

13) Centralized log view, search for WebLogic Server Instances

14) Oracle Fusion Applications backup and recovery

15) New diagnostic snapshot feature captures Oracle WebLogic Server and JVM data and packages for later analysis.

16) Centralized and Secure Credentials storage

17) Connector Integration with Incident Management

18) Improved Monitoring and Diagnostics

19) Cache Data Management for Coherence to save the queries for future reference

20) Improved Configuration Management to save the configuration in the repository as an image and compare it against a current configuration

Enjoy the Cloud!

Useful Links

OEM 12c documentation

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24628_01/index.htm

A nice pdf from Oracle technet about OEM 12c install

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/pdf/512044.pdf

OEM Official Blog

http://blogs.oracle.com/oem