As Published In November/December 2003

Getting Down to Business with Enterprise Grid Computing

By Philip J. Gill

The latest release of Oracle Application Server brings the advantages of enterprise grid computing to the middle tier.

A typical middle tier in today's enterprise is a jumble of expensive hardware and devices running Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers, HTTP servers, Web caches, portals, and so on. These resources are usually configured for maximum performance but rarely used to maximum efficiency. They often come from different vendors and with different operating systems, making them costly to install, configure, manage, and maintain. Perhaps most importantly, the middle-tier servers lack the flexibility to adapt rapidly to changing business needs.

Grid computing brings order to this chaos in the middle tier. Originally used for large-scale scientific and research computing, the grid computing model increases reliability, scalability, and manageability in the middle tier, all while reducing costs. A grid computing infrastructure turns information technology (IT) resources—computers, storage, and applications—into a single virtual system that, like a utility—power, water, gas, phone—can be tapped at will, whenever needed.

Now, Oracle Application Server 10g brings grid computing to the enterprise, providing a complete middleware layer that transforms a middle-tier infrastructure into a low-cost, highly efficient, easy-to-manage computing grid.

Out of the Lab, into the Data Center

Like other universities, Oregon Health and Science University in Portland maintains a traditional IT department that serves the entire university, with a separate high-performance computing (HPC) department for its computation-intensive research. The IT department has a traditional infrastructure of centralized servers and distributed desktops. The HPC also has servers and desktops, but in addition it operates a scientific computing grid that combines several servers into a single powerful, scalable computational resource.

Oregon Health and Science University www.ohsu.edu Location: Portland, Oregon Industry: Education Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), a public corporation, is Oregon's only health and research university. Originally funded by the state, OHSU is now a largely freestanding institution that offers the only graduate-level education in medicine, nursing, and dentistry in Oregon, as well as graduate programs in science and engineering. OHSU's administrative computing infrastructure is built almost entirely on an Oracle infrastructure, including the database, application server, and enterprise applications. Building upon that infrastructure, OHSU is looking to optimize business processes by automating many common administrative tasks, such as frequent transactions with regular suppliers, using iHub, a new component of Oracle Application Server Integration. The iHub component stores business partner trading rules, format requirements, exception handling, and more, to automate previously manual tasks. Software: Oracle9i Application Server, Oracle9i Database, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Hardware: HP Tru64 UNIX servers

"I joke that I'm going to start using their computing grid for payroll," says Jim Williams, who, as director of administrative applications, oversees OHSU's administrative, education, and research applications. All joking aside, however, Williams says grid computing can offer IT departments such as his some real benefits. "Grid computing is going to be a great way to save on platform costs," says Williams. Grids also use those computers more efficiently, he adds. "If grid computing could grab some extra cycles off of whatever computer is on the network, then that allows tremendous economies of scale," he says.

Of course, Williams knows that OHSU's back-office accounting and other administrative applications won't be running on the university's research computing grid anytime soon. But the technologies that enable OHSU's research computing grid are crossing over into the enterprise, thanks to Application Server 10g.

That crossover of grid computing from science and research environments to the enterprise is quite natural, explains Rob Cheng, principal marketing manager for Oracle Application Server. Both groups also face common needs. "The enterprise IT shop faces many of the same challenges as scientists and researchers do—the need for greater performance, higher reliability, on-demand scalability, greater flexibility, and simpler, more-automated system management, all at lower costs," says Cheng.

For one thing, says Cheng, both groups recognize that the combination of low-cost commodity blade servers; storage servers and storage-area networks (SANs); internet and Web technologies; and low-cost, high-speed networks make such infrastructures both practical and affordable.

Coincidentally, Cheng adds, "It turns out that many of the technologies that are used to coordinate resources around the globe in a science grid are very similar to the technologies we need to coordinate servers within the data center, especially within one big rack of servers or server blades."

Application Server 10g contains all of the capabilities of Oracle9iAS—industry-standard Apache Web and J2EE servers; a Web cache; an enterprise portal with content management services; enterprise security including Oracle Single Sign-On; the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-compliant Oracle Internet Directory (OID); comprehensive integration services, including enterprise application integration (EAI), business-to-business (B2B) integration, and Web services; wireless support; business intelligence; and more. To that stack, it adds new features and services for creating low-cost, efficient, easy-to-manage enterprise computing grids.

The new grid services in Application Server 10g include the ability to pool or consolidate all of an enterprise's IT resources—computers, storage, and applications—into a single virtual system, to allocate those resources dynamically across that virtual system, automate system configuration and installation and user provisioning, establish rules-based workload schedules, and monitor and analyze system and application performance.

In addition, Application Server 10g makes enterprises more flexible. In this new release, Oracle Application Server Portal 10g adds capabilities that provide flexibility in adapting to changing business needs. Meanwhile, Application Server Integration adds new services to optimize business processes and workflows. The purchasing department at OHSU, for example, is piloting an installation of Application Server Integration's iHub to automate business transactions with regular suppliers.

Grid Control for Efficient Management

Oracle Application Server works in conjunction with Oracle Enterprise Manager, the first grid-savvy version of Oracle's enterprise management system. System administrators can take advantage of the new Grid Control in Enterprise Manager to automate many of the tasks associated with installing, configuring, provisioning, and managing servers in the grid. From Grid Control, the system administrator can monitor services that are tracked by Oracle Management Agent, a feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The agent tallies the number of processors and communications ports, the amount of memory, and what applications are installed on the system and takes a system snapshot that is updated every 24 hours and reported back to Grid Control. The snapshot is stored in the Grid Repository, a dedicated repository that holds similar information on all the systems in the grid.

"Oracle Management Agent continuously monitors the system it is installed on," says Valerie Kane, group manager for Oracle Enterprise Manager. "If the server goes down or one of its applications suffers a performance problem, the agent automatically sends an alert and notifies the system administrator of the problem."

Application Server 10g simplifies management tasks and enables administrators to automate certain common but time-consuming tasks, such as system configuration and installation. "System administrators spend more time configuring and installing systems than anything else—perhaps as much as 70 percent of their time," notes Moe Fardoost, director of Oracle Technology Solutions. Using Application Server 10g, administrators can now "clone" existing systems by downloading system snapshots stored in the Grid Repository onto new systems.

Another new feature, automated provisioning, helps reduce the cost and effort of provisioning hardware, software, and users. With automated software provisioning, administrators can add new applications to the grid without interrupting operations. With automated user provisioning, administrators need only create users once in the OID.

Application Server 10g also provides a new policy-based workload management service that enables administrators to reallocate resources dynamically—say, add extra processors to an e-commerce Web site to handle an expected increase in site visits when the company launches a new product. Administrators can also schedule resources; for example, allocating additional processors to the accounting department at the end of the month when that department closes the corporate books. Those resources will switch over at the prearranged time without administrator intervention.

An application performance management service allows administrators to set performance thresholds. If a Web page with a one-second performance threshold starts taking more time, preset workload policies automatically assign more resources on the grid to maintain desired performance. The service issues alerts when applications do not perform according to those thresholds, allowing the administrator to investigate and resolve the problem.

Automated and Proactive

Earlier this year, Digex Inc., a leading international enterprise hosting services company, upgraded to Oracle Enterprise Manager to increase database administrator (DBA) productivity, uptime, and customer satisfaction. Rolled out in June to its U.S. operations, Enterprise Manager now manages 103 databases on 55 UNIX servers. "Before Enterprise Manager, we had our own scripts and monitoring tools but could only react to problems rather than resolving them before they occurred," says Lee Harris, senior manager of UNIX Technical Operations at Digex. "As well as improving customer response times, Enterprise Manager enabled each DBA to manage 40 databases—double the industry average. It also allowed us to offer customers a choice of three service levels to meet their specific requirements."

Digex www.digex.com Location: Laurel, Maryland Industry: IT Digex is a leading provider of enterprise hosting services for businesses worldwide. Its customers, who include some of the world's leading brands, rely on Digex's services to deploy scalable, high-performance, mission-critical applications on the internet. Digex has operations in the U.S., Europe, and the Pacific Rim, from which it delivers high-quality service for nearly 600 customers around the world. The company is planning to upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control to improve DBA productivity, increase customer service levels and satisfaction, and provide staff tools for proactive management. Software: Oracle9i Database; planning to upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Hardware: UNIX servers

The Laurel, Maryland-based firm has found that grid computing and Grid Control have not only improved administrators' productivity but also turned its DBA staff into proactive managers.

Enterprise Manager Grid Control gives DBAs access to the systems they manage from any location from a standard Web browser. Using Grid Control, DBAs can drill down directly from the HTML interface to get a complete view of performance at every level, from the network and operating system to the server, database, and applications. New diagnostics capabilities enable administrators to identify bottlenecks quickly across multiple layers of technology. Problems are detected automatically through Grid Control's proactive "health advisories" that include recommendations for rapid resolution. Grid Control has enabled Digex to reduce the time taken to resolve a system performance problem from one hour to just 15 minutes, cutting customer response time by 75 percent.

"The Grid Control's ease of use and built-in monitoring features enable junior data center staff to undertake tasks for which DBAs were previously required," says Harris. "This will allow us to increase the databases managed by each DBA from 40 to 68, an increase of 70 percent, and grow our business without increasing our resources."

Reliability and Beyond

An enterprise-computing grid is inherently more reliable and available than traditional clustering solutions. Clustering is already available in Oracle9iAS for its Apache Web server, the Oracle Web Cache, and Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J), the application server's J2EE-compliant Java server. Clustering is also available in Oracle Database through Oracle Real Application Clusters. And now Oracle Application Server 10g includes tighter integration between the database and the application server from a clustering/failover standpoint with the new "FaN" capability (multitier failover notification). Application Server 10g's new FaN feature provides multitier failover notification between the application server and the database. In the past, although the database cluster could quickly fail over from one node to another, the middle tier would not become aware of the change until a TCP/IP timeout triggered a reconnection to the cluster (which would reconnect transparently via the existing load-balancing support). This timeout could take as long as 15 minutes. With FaN, the database tier notifies the middle tier of the failover, resulting in an immediate reconnect and reducing the total downtime from 15 minutes to 15 seconds.

Conference Planners LLC has found that the combined clustering of Oracle Application Server and Oracle Real Application Clusters has increased reliability and dramatically improved performance. Based in Burlingame, California, the international event management firm organizes conferences and events for more than 75 companies, including some of the largest in Silicon Valley. One example is Oracle Corporation, which uses Conference Planners to manage the registration for OracleWorld. Conference Planners' Web site provides information about upcoming conferences and events, including programs, speakers, and topics, as well as pre-event registration services. That system also provides on-site registration and other services during events at locations around the world.

Conference Planners LLC www.cplan.com Location: Burlingame, California Industry: Conference and event management Conference Planners LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of George P. Johnson Co., is an international conference and event management firm. It holds trade shows, exhibits, and conferences around the world for its clients, who include some of Silicon Valley's leading companies, among them Oracle Corporation. To serve its clientele, the company operates a Web site for event information, online registration, reservations, and other conference and event-related services on a 24/7 basis. To provide high reliability and performance, the Web site uses multiple layers of clustered Oracle technologies—including the database, Web servers and Web services, and Web caching—in its software infrastructure stack. The firm plans to further exploit the clustering capabilities of Oracle Application Server and add clustered Java servers in the near future. Software: Oracle9i Application Server, Oracle9i Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Veritas Advanced Server Clusters

Michael Winner, the company's vice president of technology, says that with customers and attendees around the world, in so many times zones, Conference Planner's online conference information and registration system must be up and running 24/7. "When you have 8,000 to 12,000 people coming on-site to an event, it would be pretty much biblical if we went down," says Winner.

To provide high reliability and performance, Conference Planners' Web site is clustered at the database level, using Oracle9i Database's Real Application Clusters, and at multiple places in Oracle9iAS, including the Web HTTP server, J2EE server, and Web Cache. Initially, Conference Planners looked at clustering through Real Application Clusters to scale its production environment, reduce maintenance costs, and separate functions either by instance on the physical server in the rack or by URL. Winner says the company got that and more, including more-efficient use of resources and better overall performance.

"When we announce an event on our Web site, we see exponential spikes, to the power of five or six times," says Winner. "We're sleeping a lot better at this point, based on the scalability we've added to production through clustering technology."

Real Application Clusters also makes more-efficient use of servers than regular clustering, adds Winner. "Before, those servers were just sitting there waiting for a failover, and now they're part of the cluster."

Recently, Conference Planners added clusters of the Oracle9iAS Web Cache to its software stack. Web Cache compresses and caches frequently accessed files, exponentially improving the performance of existing configurations. The performance is so outstanding—even halfway around the world, says Winner—that the firm might not have to establish a second data center abroad as planned, to service its growing international customer base.

"We're seeing measurements come out to be no more than tenths of a second difference to a Singapore location," he says. "If we can keep our infrastructure in one place and combine the resources and talent in [the San Francisco, California, area] to support global operations, that's a tremendous savings. In some cases, I've seen worse performance from the Pacific Northwest than from Singapore."

In the future, Conference Planners is looking to implement clusters of the J2EE server of Oracle Application Server. "This will give us the ability to store Java containers on multiple servers, and, therefore, we can distribute the load of those applications across multiple systems and provide a high-availability option," says Winner.

Winner looks forward to investigating the potential benefits through added scalability and availability that grid computing with Application Server 10g might offer his organization. "I see grid computing as a step up from clustering," Winner says. "That, and its being able to better utilize servers that are underutilized, could be of great value to us."

Toward a Service-Oriented Architecture

In today's highly competitive environment, businesses need to adapt not only their computing resources to changing business requirements, by using an enterprise computing grid, but also their business processes and workflows, by using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Claire Dessaux, director of marketing at Oracle, says Application Server 10g provides an ideal platform for SOA. "Traditionally, enterprise applications have been written as single, monolithic, and all-encompassing entities, making updates and changes to these applications expensive and time-consuming. These applications have been built to automate disparate business processes without the ability to adapt themselves to changing business needs. Changing business processes and information flows in this situation is difficult and time-consuming," explains Dessaux. "In a Service-Oriented Architecture, applications are assembled as a collection of services, each of which represents separate and discrete functions or features. As business needs change, services can be added, subtracted, or updated as needed, to evolve as the business needs it, making the agile enterprise a reality."

Working together, SOA and enterprise grid computing allow enterprises to make the dynamic changes necessary to stay ahead of the competition for a long time to come.

Philip J. Gill (philipgill@aol.com) is a San Diego, California-based freelance writer and editor. He is a contributing editor to Oracle Publishing.

New Features in Oracle Application Server 10g The following describes just some of what you'll find in Oracle's newest Application Server: Oracle Application Server 10g: Enterprise Computing Grid: With this service, administrators can "virtualize," or pool, IT resources—including computers, storage, and applications—into a single virtual system whose resources can be managed from a single administration console and allocated dynamically, according to demand. Automated Software Provisioning: With this service, applications can be installed and put into production without taking down any systems or applications already on the grid. Automated User Provisioning: Administrators need to create a user only once in the Oracle Internet Directory (OID), and that user has access to all approved applications. Policy-Based Workload Management: With this service, workload schedules can be programmed ahead of time, allowing the grid to automatically scale resources up or down without intervention. Automated Application Performance Management: This service allows administrators to set performance thresholds for systems and applications down to the Web-page level, and to be alerted when those performance thresholds are violated. It can also automatically assign more resources when designated functions or applications exceed performance thresholds. Oracle Application Server Portal 10g: Unified Web Presence: The portal provides a single interface to all applications and portal users, whether internal or external to the enterprise, regardless of device used to access it. OmniPortlet: Using XQuery technology, this service allows users to query and collect information from multiple applications and then display it in customized formats as charts or tables. Portlet-to-Portlet Communications: This feature wraps portal applications, information sources, and services so they can be linked or chained to others to alter or create business processes and information flows. Web Clipping: This service captures not just an HTML Web page but also the application logic behind it so that it can be stored, reused, or linked to other information sources and applications to create new business processes or optimize existing ones. Oracle Application Server Integration: Business Process Management: Various integration services, including application-to-application (A2A) enterprise application integration (EAI) services, can be used to link or chain applications, information sources, and services to optimize business processes or create new ones. Trading Partner Management: Services for creating automated business processes and transactions across enterprise boundaries— with frequent suppliers or customers, for example. Business Activity Monitoring: Tools for monitoring and analyzing business processes and transactions across enterprise boundaries, to optimize these operations. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g: Grid Control: This HTML-based system management console administers and monitors all grid resources from any location using a standard Web browser. Grid Repository: A dedicated repository used to store profiles or snapshots of all systems and resources in the computing grid. Oracle Management Agent: This C process is installed on every server or storage device in an enterprise grid; records a snapshot of the system and its applications, which is then stored in the Grid Repository; and continuously monitors its performance and feeds that information back to the Grid Control console. Configuration Agent: A diagnostic tool, this agent allows administrators to compare system configurations to determine why one system is performing properly and the other is not. The following describes just some of what you'll find in Oracle's newest Application Server: Oracle Application Server 10g: Enterprise Computing Grid: With this service, administrators can "virtualize," or pool, IT resources—including computers, storage, and applications—into a single virtual system whose resources can be managed from a single administration console and allocated dynamically, according to demand. Automated Software Provisioning: With this service, applications can be installed and put into production without taking down any systems or applications already on the grid. Automated User Provisioning: Administrators need to create a user only once in the Oracle Internet Directory (OID), and that user has access to all approved applications. Policy-Based Workload Management: With this service, workload schedules can be programmed ahead of time, allowing the grid to automatically scale resources up or down without intervention. Automated Application Performance Management: This service allows administrators to set performance thresholds for systems and applications down to the Web-page level, and to be alerted when those performance thresholds are violated. It can also automatically assign more resources when designated functions or applications exceed performance thresholds. Oracle Application Server Portal 10g: Unified Web Presence: The portal provides a single interface to all applications and portal users, whether internal or external to the enterprise, regardless of device used to access it. OmniPortlet: Using XQuery technology, this service allows users to query and collect information from multiple applications and then display it in customized formats as charts or tables. Portlet-to-Portlet Communications: This feature wraps portal applications, information sources, and services so they can be linked or chained to others to alter or create business processes and information flows. Web Clipping: This service captures not just an HTML Web page but also the application logic behind it so that it can be stored, reused, or linked to other information sources and applications to create new business processes or optimize existing ones. Oracle Application Server Integration: Business Process Management: Various integration services, including application-to-application (A2A) enterprise application integration (EAI) services, can be used to link or chain applications, information sources, and services to optimize business processes or create new ones. Trading Partner Management: Services for creating automated business processes and transactions across enterprise boundaries— with frequent suppliers or customers, for example. Business Activity Monitoring: Tools for monitoring and analyzing business processes and transactions across enterprise boundaries, to optimize these operations. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g: Grid Control: This HTML-based system management console administers and monitors all grid resources from any location using a standard Web browser. Grid Repository: A dedicated repository used to store profiles or snapshots of all systems and resources in the computing grid. Oracle Management Agent: This C process is installed on every server or storage device in an enterprise grid; records a snapshot of the system and its applications, which is then stored in the Grid Repository; and continuously monitors its performance and feeds that information back to the Grid Control console. Configuration Agent: A diagnostic tool, this agent allows administrators to compare system configurations to determine why one system is performing properly and the other is not.

A Healthy Prognosis Oracle Application Server Integration moves beyond the confines of the enterprise, offering new capabilities for integrating, automating, and optimizing common business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland is a long-time Oracle customer whose administrative and back-office computing functions are built almost entirely on the Oracle infrastructure. A public corporation, OHSU offers the only graduate programs in medicine, nursing, and dentistry in Oregon, as well as graduate programs in science and engineering. OHSU runs its back-office operations on Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server (Oracle9iAS), and Oracle E-Business Suite 11i. In the last few months, OHSU has been implementing iHub, a new component of Oracle Application Server Integration, looking to cut costs by automating common business transactions, says Jim Williams, OHSU's director of administrative applications. Although it brings in about US$800 million in patient revenue and another US$250 million in sponsored research grants every year, OHSU is always looking at ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies, says Williams. For instance, to control inventory costs—always critical for a medical center—OHSU is implementing a just-in-time (JIT) inventory system. That's where iHub comes in. Thus far, OHSU has created a pilot to test iHub in typical transactions sets the JIT project would need. "A typical use would be sending an electronic purchase order to a supplier," says Williams. "The user would create a purchase order in an Oracle E-Business 11i application. The application converts the PO to an XML format and sticks it in the XML gateway that's included in Application Server. iHub accepts the transaction from the XML gateway, and, based on what it knows about that particular outbound PO for that particular supplier, it will process it and convert it to whatever secure protocol the supplier uses and send it out." Today, the typical PO is faxed to suppliers, an expensive and time-consuming process that is prone to errors. With iHub, Williams says, he expects to reduce errors and drive down costs to pennies per transaction, while helping the JIT inventory program run smoothly. "The inventory-level-to-cycle-time relationship is fairly straightforward," explains Williams, "But, IT wants to enable e-commerce cycle times that are so minimal relative to the rest of the supply chain we enable our Logistic Division to drive processes according to whatever cycle times maximize customer satisfaction." Besides iHub, the new features of Application Server Integration include Trading Partner Management, Business Process Management, and Business Activity Monitoring services. Trading Partner Management includes profile management, format management, and industry process services. The profile management service contains an unattended internet send/receive feature and also stores information about specific trading partners, such as e-mail address, URL, and required authorizations for trading with that partner. The format management service stores information needed to translate outgoing and incoming messages into the required formats so the information can be understood at either end of the transaction. The industry process management stores information about special vertical industry format standards that trading partners might require, such as UCCnet for retailers, HL-7 for healthcare, and RosettaNET for high technology. Business Process Management includes business events; error handling; process management, automation, and optimization; human workflow; and organizational management. Business Activity Monitoring services include exception or problem alerts and tools to collect and analyze B2B transactions, including reporting, logging, auditing, and data mining services.