The next release of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control will extend the powerful Grid Management capabilities introduced with Grid Control 10g R1. This new release will provide unparalleled service management capabilities, automate more error-prone and time-consuming tasks, broaden the reach of Oracle’s management solution, and give customers the ability to provision new systems – from bare metal to fully supporting a Grid-based application – effortlessly and without error.

Grid Control’s service management solution will deliver unique functionality, differentiating Oracle’s management solution from our competition. Customers will be able to model services – defined as ‘an application or utility that provides a business function’ – and the data center infrastructure components upon which the service depends. New visual topologies will make it easier to view the status of infrastructure components and how they relate to one another and the service. Using either synthetic transactions or system-level status customers will know how their services are performing for their end-users at all times. New root-cause functionality will provide critical information, highlighting faults within a service and given customers the information they need to focus administrative attention. Complementing the new service functionality Grid Control will provide ‘dashboard’ views displaying the key ‘at a glance’ metrics administrators need to know about the services running across their Grid environment. New Service Level Reports will allow customers to define and measure the performance of their business services against pre-defined goals and timeframes.

New provisioning functionality will simplify deployment of databases and applications, and adding new resources – hosts, Linux operating systems and RAC databases – to existing RAC environments. New image management features will give customers a library of ‘reference configurations’ to apply rather than forcing them to manually configure each new system from scratch – not only a time consuming, costly task but also very error-prone.

Building on the policy functionality introduced in Grid Control 10g R1, the new release delivers over 50 new out-of-box security policies for the Grid environment. Integrated with critical patch functionality customers will have the comfort of knowing their systems are up-to-date with the most important security related patches. Customers will also be armed with educational information about security vulnerabilities in their environment, why they matter, and how to rectify them.

The new release of Grid Control will also automate the application of monitoring and policy management thresholds and rules across any number of systems in the Grid environment. Additionally, adaptive monitoring baselines will allow customers automatically set thresholds based upon expected rolling performance as opposed to using a static setting for all times of the day.

Powerful, easy-to-use reporting functionality gives administrators the ability to build custom reports and schedule the running of reports against valuable repository data. Reports can be published over the web or emailed to those interested – extending the reach of valuable management data beyond the data center to end-users, external customers and upper management.

Finally, because the Oracle platform extends beyond Oracle software and the systems hosting that software, new functionality in Grid Control will seamlessly integrated monitoring and management of non-Oracle, 3rd party components such as server load balancers, firewalls, additional application servers and storage components.

Grid Control differentiates Oracle in its ability to deliver the promise of Grid Computing. Grid Control provides the necessary management capabilities that address the unique challenges in the Grid Computing environment. Through automation, policy-based management, and rich end-to-end application management Oracle gives customers a complete, cost-effective solution for reaping the financial and operational benefits of getting on the Grid.