Oracle Expands Ops Center's Reach With Hardware Management

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Oracle continues to leverage and integrate technology it gained with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems as part of its integrated software/hardware pitch to enterprise customers.

The latest example is Tuesday’s release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Ops Center, designed to greatly reduce hardware management costs as well as the operational costs associated with a move to cloud computing. The software’s unified management capabilities are optimized for Oracle’s (NASDAQ: ORCL) systems.

Specifically, Oracle said the new Ops Center solution gives IT the ability to manage across physical and virtual environments, Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux operating systems, Oracle’s Sun SPARC and x86 servers including firmware, clusters, Sun storage and Oracle’s network fabric. Systems covered in Oracle’s application-to-disk management approach include the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud, as well as Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line.

“We have a large product line of Ethernet and Infiniband network devices and Exadata and Exalogic systems that use Sun switches that now can all be managed centrally from Ops Center,” Steve Wilson, Oracle’s vice president of systems management, told InternetNews.com. “And this converged hardware management gives the customer the ability to move faster into cloud environments.”

On the management benefits side, Wilson gave the example of a systems administrator who needs to patch or take down a server for maintenance.

“That’s not that easy to do, there are a lot of log-in boxes and Unix names and it’s likely to be administered by a totally different group,” he said. “Now we’ve integrated the application and sys app tools so you can click on a box and see what software is running, get the statistics you need and gain much better visibility into the system. “

Another scenario Wilson mentions is the database administrator who needs to debug a problem in the database. This is of course an area where database giant Oracle has long offered diagnostic tools, but he said Ops Center can identify when there’s a hardware issue at the root of the problem, like a power supply or fan that’s failed.

“Instead of being in the dark about what the real problem is, the DBA can call the sys admin and get it fixed,” he said.

Wilson said Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Ops Center is set for availability on November 19.

The news comes after another infrastructure management announcement Oracle made last week when it proposed a cloud API for managing cloud services.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.