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

What is Application Server?

Before we roll into the concept of Application Server, I take you through the concept of Web Server.

• Web Server hosts static html pages and image
• Web Server uses http protocol

Apache HTTP Server (Initial Release, year 1995) and it was the first alternative for Netscape Web Server (Currently Oracle iPlanet). During mid 90’s, Corporate’s simply had few html pages to display their information.

The business’s wanted to do Ecommerce later when the Internet started becoming a household name. The online commerce applications needed to connect to Database, Main Frame, Email Server and other Messaging Systems inside the IT network to input, retrieve and send the data. However Web Server doesn’t have the ability to communicate with the above mentioned backend systems.

So the Application Developers developed an Interface between Web Server and the back end systems. The interface was made up of various languages like C, PHP, PERL, Java and all. It introduced majorly two problems to the businesses.

1) Every business had their own kind of technology stack for these interfaces. No standardization.

2) The job of the developer is to develop applications for the core business and not to develop code for standard things like connectivity to the database, connectivity to the email server etc. This approach increased the burden on the developers and businesses needed people with heterogeneous skill sets.

See the below diagram

Sun Microsystems thought about it and came up with J2EE (Java EE) frame work. The J2EE frame work (EJB, JDBC, JMS, JNDI, JSF, JSP, Servlet, RMI, Java Mail, JCE, JAAS, JACC, JCA, XML, JMX, JPA, JTA, RMI/IIOP and Web Services components) provides a standard way for Enterprise Application Integration and it lets the developers to focus on their business logic.

Sun wanted to spread this technology further and it allowed vendors to develop J2EE Application Servers by providing licenses. Sun kept the specification, rules and core library with them and companies like BEA, IBM, and Oracle got into the J2EE Application Server Market. During the period 1999-2001, there were more than 70 J2EE Application Servers in the market.

When a customer buys an Application Server, it provides the routine EAI in a configurable way and no need to code.

See the diagram below.

Today there are two major competitors in this J2EE Application Server market and they are Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. Other Application Server JBoss also has its own market share.

IBM is selling more than 20 products in the name of WebSphere so it seems it has more market share than Oracle WebLogic. Truly, Oracle WebLogic is No 1 in the market because of its flexibility, up to date alignment with J2EE and Scalability.

What is Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) or OFM?

The term Oracle Fusion Middleware has existed since 2005 but has since become very popular after acquisitions of BEA and Sun MicroSystems by Oracle.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a wonderful innovation and delivery from Larry Ellison and this Software Suite has the tremendous potential to enable and support the Corporate IT Business.

Oracle says "Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the #1 application infrastructure foundation available today". Amen!

Let's look into the details here.

Oracle Fusion Middleware contains the following product families

• Application Grid
• Business Intelligence
• Business Process Management
• Collaboration
• Content Management
• Data Integration
• Developer Tools
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Exalogic
• Identity Management
• In-Memory Data Grid
• Oracle Fusion Middleware for Applications
• Portal
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• SOA Governance
• Transaction Processing
• Web Experience Management
• WebCenter
• WebLogic Server

And

• JAVA

The total number of products which comes under Oracle Fusion Middleware could be more than 200.

(BEA)WebLogic Server is the base for majority of the Oracle FMW products. Without a fraction of doubt It is the No 1 J2EE (Java EE) Application Server in the world. Oracle works to make WebLogic as the base for all their Application Products.

IMO, It is a wise decision to do because WebLogic is the most stable, robust and scalable Application Server for more than a decade.