Oracle retools Enterprise Manager for the cloud

Oracle has retooled its Enterprise Manager console to handle the management of Oracle products that dovetail into private and hybrid cloud environments.

Enterprise Manager 12c, introduced on Monday at Oracle OpenWorld, is the first in a number of Oracle software products that the company expects to adapt to clouds — represented by the 'c' in the product name. 

"You can't just look at the cloud from the perspective of virtualisation and consolidation," Richard Sarwal, head of product development at Oracle, said in a speech introducing the software at the San Francisco event. Oracle argues businesses need to consider management and automation too when they are setting up a cloud.

Enterprise Manager is a general-purpose monitoring, automation and data discovery hub for Oracle's many software products. It can centralise data from the majority of Oracle's major software branches, such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel and the E-Business Suite.

For the cloud-friendly version, Oracle has added a dedicated console for managing all things cloud, ranging from consolidation and capacity planning, through to metering and chargeback.

Major features

"[It] is quite a transformatory product," Sarwal said. "There's about 200 major features into this release of the product, [and] over 500 enhancement requests were done."

With Enterprise Manager 12c, administrators can create shared pools of compute resources virtualised on Oracle's VM 3.0 technology, and generate portals containing a curated set of applications for users to choose from. This allows the software to work as a central management hub for clouds built on top of Oracle IT infrastructure.

Some new features are similar to those introduced by VMware in its vSphere 5 and vCloud Director management suites. Like Oracle, VMware has worked hard on creating online portals that people can access to get applications delivered to their client.

Unlike those rival management suites, Enterprise Manager 12c can handle and orchestrate clouds across physical and virtual infrastructures built on top of both x86 and Sparc computing architectures. Oracle picked up Sparc server hardware when it acquired Sun.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c follows Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, which launched in April 2010. Sarwal said 12c is one of the most important versions of the software in the past five years, and that more than four million developer hours went into the release.

The company added security features to 12c as well, including a dedicated database security dashboard that amalgamates information about database access, data encryption and other security policies.

In addition, Oracle has created a set of pre-built tools called Process Accelerators that can be integrated with an Enterprise Manager 12c infrastructure to automate business processes such as invoice processing and incident reporting.