Oracle Releases New Enterprise Manager 10g

The release, due Monday, offers “a built out and better support model for reporting on services, not just applications, and offers dashboards for C-level execs and IT people,” said Jay Rossiter, vice president of system management products for the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based vendor.

The company also is launching a partner program to encourage development of plug-ins and connectors for the product.

The dashboards “inter-relate system and service performance, showing root cause [of problems] and their impact,” Rossiter said.

It also can automatically provision database clusters, he said.

New “bare-metal provisioning” for Linux allows VARs to pre-test operating systems and software, and automates creation of software image libraries.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, Release 2 sports plug-ins for BEA WebLogic, f5 Networks Server Load Balancer, IBM WebSphere application server and Network Appliance NetApp Filer. Plug-ins for Check Point Firewall and Juniper Netscreen Firewall will follow. Plug-ins typically cost $1,500 per CPU or network device. The NetApps storage plug-in is $1,500 per terabyte managed. Upcoming system management connectors for Hewlett-Packard OpenView or NEC system management systems will be $5,000 per connector.

“In many cases, when you go into IT organizations you have all this network and server stuff over there and then Oracle over here in the corner. This might remedy that,” said Ron Zapar, president of Re-Quest, a Chicago-area Oracle partner.

Oracle pitches its management as a way to ease the transition to grid computing, where tasks are divvied up among an array of low-cost servers.

Zapar said grids are good but are “a ways off because people run multiple versions of the database. To get to grid, not only do all the databases have to be on the same version but on the same patch level.”