This Week in Innovation

Oracle Extends Grid Computing Beyond the Database to Application Infrastructure

Oracle's pioneering work in grid computing, which has already revolutionized database performance and availability, is now bringing the same profound changes to application infrastructure. By combining Oracle's grid heritage with its unique position as a middleware and application vendor, Oracle is able to expand grid computing to provide an increasingly dynamic, fluid, and automated computing infrastructure for enterprise applications.

The story begins with Oracle Database, which is engineered to run on a pool of storage devices rather than a single, dedicated machine. New server nodes can be added as needs expand without service disruption. No more tearing down and rebuilding. To make the database grid easy to implement and manage, Oracle Database 11g includes tools for automatic, on-demand provisioning, and optimal utilization.

Untethering the Application Infrastructure
Now the Oracle application grid brings these same principles of dynamism and automation to the entire application environment. In a traditional application infrastructure, an application is tethered to a dedicated set of hardware resources. To meet service-level agreements, the application must be backed by a stack large enough to support peak demand.

Oracle's application grid approach changes the equation by allowing customers to pool, share, and dynamically adjust the supply of hardware and infrastructure resources to meet the needs of a range of applications. The approach allows for less-expensive, more-agile infrastructure that enables rapid application deployment and improved overall performance.

Oracle supports the application grid approach by combining and integrating a series of industry-leading technologies, including:

• Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g. The linchpin of the Oracle application grid, Oracle WebLogic application server technology makes possible the kind of real-time monitoring and provisioning for Java applications upon which an application grid depends. The latest release includes Oracle Real Operations Insight and Oracle Real Operations Automation, providing greater integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and delivering increased performance and visibility while eliminating custom scripting and configurations.
• Oracle Tuxedo. Like Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g, Oracle Tuxedo provides mainframe-class scale and performance on distributed systems for software written in C, C++, and COBOL.
• Oracle JRockit. Providing the world's fastest Java virtual machine, Oracle JRockit products enable Java applications to run in real time without changing code and reduce latency to milliseconds, which is critical for running Java applications in event-driven, service-oriented architectures with extreme transaction processing needs.
• Oracle Coherence. Delivering an in-memory data grid, Oracle Coherence harnesses the memory of multiple machines to create a large, seamless memory space for data objects. Beyond memory caching, Oracle Coherence enables automated partitioning of data. As a result, computations can be distributed, which essentially "parallelizes" operations. The result: you can essentially have an entire database in -memory, substantially boosting application responsiveness.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single, integrated interface for administration and monitoring of applications and systems. It continually monitors resource allocations and utilization, provides automated alerts, and automatically takes action when defined service levels are at risk.

This unique combination of integrated, best-of-breed technologies allows Oracle to extend its grid expertise into the application layer making possible an innovative and powerful application grid approach that will increase the performance and agility of customer applications.