Oracle Magazine Issue Archive
2007
January 2007
CHANNELS: Partner NewsPartner NewsGridApp Systems Offer Free Oracle Real Application Clusters LicensesGridApp Systems' "Ready. Set. RAC!" promotion bundles GridApp's D2500 database appliance with free Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) licenses. GridApp's reference architecture for Oracle RAC allows companies to avoid possible unforeseen costs of installing and managing an Oracle RAC environment. The "Ready. Set. RAC!" offering also includes optional storage and migration services. GridApp's D2500 appliance combines IBM BladeCenter servers with Clarity, GridApp's database automation software, to simplify, automate, and virtualize the database environment. Because of the simplification and automation it provides, the D2500 can be put into production within one day and can scale databases in minutes, says GridApp Chief Scientist Matt Zito. IBM Boosts Oracle on System Z and LinuxIBM and Oracle are collaborating on sales and marketing of enterprise business solutions featuring Oracle Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's Siebel and Oracle's PeopleSoft products) and technology for Linux on IBM System z mainframe servers. The Oracle/IBM Joint Solution Center in Montpelier, France, and the IBM Oracle International Competency Center in California's Silicon Valley will develop best practices, implementation guidance, and support procedures for the new comprehensive solutions. The solutions will be available on the IBM System z9 Enterprise Class and IBM System z9 Business Class servers. Customer incentives up to US$250,000 are planned. "Today, we offer a comprehensive set of enterprise infrastructure and solutions that build upon and modernize customer investments in System z, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel Customer Relationship Management, and PeopleSoft Enterprise using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Linux on System z," says Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle's Global Technology business unit. EMC Launches New Oracle Solutions and SupportEMC has expanded its specialized storage solutions and services portfolio for Oracle customers in midsize and enterprise organizations and has announced new investments to support Oracle Grid technology. For midsize enterprises, EMC has developed integrated solutions for Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters based on the EMC Celerra IP storage systems. EMC and Oracle have performed system-level testing and validation of these storage systems in Oracle environments, and can provide documented best practices, reference architectures, and real-world validations to partners and customers.
For enterprise environments, EMC has developed an assessment service for Oracle Database 10g Readiness, and a Health Check service for infrastructures supporting Oracle E-Business Suite. The assessment service uses EMC tools and information lifecycle management methodology to assess a customer's environment and make recommendations about data layout, backup and recovery, availability, and infrastructure for migrating to Oracle Database 10g. The Health Check service evaluates the storage infrastructure up through the Oracle application layer to ensure that customers' Oracle solutions are running on appropriate infrastructure, and makes recommendations for optimizing those environments. EMC is also investing US$20 million to help Oracle customers use its reference architectures, the two companies' joint services, and EMC/Oracle proof-of-concept facilities. Adobe Builds Flex into Oracle PortalsOracle and Adobe are collaborating to allow developers to include animations, charts, and graphs created in Adobe Flex (Adobe's Flash-based application creation framework) with other Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (Ajax) content in enterprise portals created by Oracle Portal. This allows applications with highly visual displays to be integrated with enterprise processes and data, creating enterprise mashups that have the impact and effectiveness of Web 2.0 applications but that also preserve the standards-based infrastructure. The integration works with the current generation of Oracle Portal, and will be incorporated into future Oracle user-interaction environments. Oracle and Adobe intend to work with the Java Standardization Request (JSR) 168, JSR 268, and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0 standards groups on the integration. Itemfield ContentMaster Now Integrated with Warehouse BuilderItemfield has integrated its ContentMaster universal data transformation software with Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2. The combined offering uses ContentMaster's data transformation capabilities to allow Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to handle any type of data, including unstructured documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Adobe Portable Document Format files, and semistructured data such as electronic data interchange, Health Level 7, and complex COBOL copybooks. By using Itemfield's software, Oracle customers can integrate unstructured and semistructured data for extract, transform, and load; data quality and auditing; integrated relational and dimensional modeling; and lifecycle management of data and metadata. Genpact and TurnKey Automate Oracle E-Business Suite TestingGenpact and TurnKey Solutions, two members of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, have formed a global alliance to provide testing automation for Oracle E-Business Suite customers. Genpact will implement TurnKey's testing scripts against a wide range of Oracle modules, including Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources Management, Oracle Manufacturing, Oracle Order Management, and Oracle Projects. This will automate functional and regression testing efforts to improve patching, upgrade, and go-live Oracle E-Business Suite 11i rollouts. One result, according to TurnKey CEO Bruce R. Guebner, will be more-effective conference room pilots. "As a result of deploying these automated technologies, we've seen a significant drop-off in the number of functional business users and technical engineers required to meet ever-more demanding testing lifecycle deadlines," Guebner says. "With this automation deployed, customers no longer have to wait for the application to be ready prior to testing." NAVTEQ Map Data Now Bundled with Oracle ApplicationsOracle and NAVTEQ, a global provider of digital maps for vehicle navigation and location-based solutions, have reached a multiyear worldwide agreement to incorporate NAVTEQ boundary mapping data into Oracle Database 10g and other Oracle products, effectively coupling geospatial information with enterprise data from supply chain, customer relationship management, and planning and risk-assessment applications. The NAVTEQ-Oracle combination will make it easier for customers to employ Oracle Spatial 10g, Oracle Locator, Oracle Application Server 10g MapViewer, and future Oracle products that will use geographic data.
NAVTEQ's mapping data includes administrative boundaries for countries, states, and cities, as well as major highways and roads. The company also plans to offer additional map and demographic products, such as street networks, ZIP codes, and industry-specific data sets, to Oracle customers. AppSecInc's AppRadar Now Available for Oracle on LinuxApplication Security, Inc., (AppSecInc) has announced Oracle on Linux support in AppRadar, part of its application security solution. AppRadar uses real-time monitoring and security auditing to defend against application vulnerabilities while ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements. AppRadar protects databases against internal and external attacks without degrading database performance, and supports both host- and network-based deployment. AppSecInc's decision to support Oracle on Linux was driven by customer demand. AppRadar is part of AppSecInc's database security suite, which also includes AppDetective for database vulnerability assessment scanning, DbEncrypt for column-level database encryption, and AppSecInc Console for distributed management. SilverStorm RDS Over InfiniBank Now on Oracle Real Application ClustersSilverStorm Technologies, a provider of high-performance interconnect solutions for clustered computing, has released the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) over InfiniBand interconnect for Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g (Oracle RAC). InfiniBand is a high-performance, switched fabric interconnect standard for servers. RDS was codeveloped by SilverStorm and Oracle. In beta testing, RDS over InfiniBand provided up to 60 percent performance improvement over Gigabit Ethernet for interconnect-intensive applications. SilverStorm's high-performance clustering solutions for Oracle RAC are showcased in Oracle's Enterprise Technology Centers. RDS has been validated through Intel's Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance program and is available for Oracle Database 10g Release 2 at no cost and in SilverStorm's QuickSilver 3.2 or later host releases for Linux.
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