OpenWorld: Oracle updates Enterprise Manager for the cloud computing era

SAN FRANCISCO: Oracle has launched an upgrade to its Enterprise Manager product, designed to take advantage of the latest cloud computing technologies.

The latest edition has been branded Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c as a reflection of the new cloud focus. It is the first major release for three years, according to Richard Sarwal, Oracle senior vice president for product development.

Ahead of the main Enterprise Manager announcement at OpenWorld in San Francisco, Sarwal told a small group of press that version 12c has evolved the product from managing just databases, to managing operating systems, virtualisation, middleware and applications.

A key upgrade is an infrastructure-as-a-service layer which lets customers pool storage and networking resources to construct assemblies. The new capabilities also provide chargeback and metering for the resources used.

"The software is all focused towards enterprise private clouds. You get the benefits of agility and transparency, but it's inside the enterprise. Large enterprises, certainly in our environment, won't be moving to a public cloud like Amazon anytime soon," Sarwal said.

Security has also been upgraded, and Enterprise Manager 12c now supports Kerberos and offers Active Directory integration.

A new database security dashboard lets companies monitor and configure security policies centrally, while new application data modelling tools help to discover sensitive data such as credit card numbers that need to be masked, encrypted or audited.

Sarwal said that the product has also been completely rearchitected to split the different database, middleware and Fusion applications into separate components. This makes it easier to apply updates for each of the product lines via plug-ins, he explained.

Although plug-ins are available to manage third-party products such as WebSphere, SQL Server and NetApp via Enterprise Manager, Sarwal was scathing about this approach.

"We believe the value-add lies in the stack. If you want the deep diagnostics capabilities for Oracle, you are going to have to use what we provide. Firms might tell you they can manage DB2, SQL Server and DB, but they can't," he said.

Sarwal added that a company running IBM and Oracle databases will get the best level of performance by using a separate management tool for each database.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is available from Monday. Sarwal was unable to give pricing details.