By streamlining complex processes and automating manual tasks, Oracle Grid Control makes information technology (IT) more agile, enabling enterprises to deliver better application performance to meet expected service levels, while lowering costs associated with IT management.

In Release 2, Oracle Grid Control will offer new, automated software management features, allowing administrators to deploy systems quickly, easily and consistently, avoiding the common pitfalls of time-consuming, error-prone system set ups. Additionally, the new release will feature new Service Level Management functionality, enabling business stakeholders to view business services and service level performance on a single, intuitive, concise screen. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 is scheduled to be generally available in mid-2005.

"Oracle Grid Control helps eliminate management complexity", stated Jay Rossiter, vice president of Systems Management Products, Oracle Corporation. "With a single view of the performance of an organisation's key service offerings and technology assets and new, robust provisioning functionality, Oracle Grid Control automates manual, labor-intensive activities. This allows administrators to spend less time and resources managing IT operations and more time focused on business critical projects."

Oracle Grid Control will introduce breakthrough service management features such as service modelling and a new Service Dashboard, providing high-level decision makers, such as CIOs or IT managers, with advanced capabilities to communicate service management and planning information more effectively with their business counterparts. Business stakeholders will be able to view IT services in a business context, allowing them to better understand service level agreements, in real-time and historically, and their impact on business performance. The Service Dashboard will provide a unique approach for IT to illustrate its relevance to a business, enabling enterprises to budget more effectively.

With Release 2, software provisioning functionality will increase the reliability and decrease the labour costs of deploying new systems. One of the key features will be the ability to store certified software images in an image library, e.g. operating system, database and Oracle Real Application Clusters installations and configurations, and automatically deploy new systems by directly referencing the library. This gives customers the assurance that each deployment - whether it's to one or hundreds of systems - is tested and in compliance with corporate standards. Additionally, Oracle Grid Control will co-ordinate the deployment of multi-tier applications by seamlessly managing this otherwise complex operation across multiple nodes and tiers.

Acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of IT infrastructures, Oracle Grid Control will deliver increased support for heterogeneous systems including alternative application servers and for Linux. The new release will feature diagnostic and management capabilities for IBM WebSphere (version 5.0 and above) and BEA WebLogic (version 7.0 and above), thus providing greater detail about the performance of the middle-tier and the applications deployed on those products. With increased insight into the performance of third-party products, Oracle Grid Control users will be better able to effectively diagnose and resolve issues related to the middle tier.

Organisations operating Linux servers will benefit greatly from Oracle Grid Control's bare metal provisioning functionality. This feature will enable administrators to provision Linux servers directly from Oracle Grid Control. For customers that have standardized their enterprise grids on Linux, Oracle Grid Control will provide the ability to provision their technology infrastructure and reduce the need for third-party system management tools.

A key aspect of automation lies in the standardization of systems and the processes employed to manage those systems. The new release will offer management templates and policies enhancing the ability of enterprises to standardize configuration policies and management practices to best satisfy security and corporate compliance mandates. These features will make it possible for companies to respond to and meet regulatory requirements in an easy and traceable way.

Oracle Grid Control will continue to meet the systems management demands of organisations through numerous additional key features:

• Topology Visualization will provide a visual representation of the IT systems and services, as well as their relationships. This feature will provide an integrated view of the Oracle Application Server 10g environment as well as simplify the administration of Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g, Oracle's clustering technology for packaged and custom applications;
• Root Cause Analysis will allow administrators to quickly pinpoint performance, availability and capacity problems;
• Complete Oracle Real Application Clusters provisioning will allow administrators to both convert a single Oracle Database into a clustered database with Oracle Real Application Clusters as well as deploy a new, certified instance of Oracle Real Application Clusters for immediate support and added capacity of a production application;
• Reference-based patching will deliver a lights-out solution to patching Linux servers, eliminating the single biggest barrier to rapid application deployment; and,