The latest version of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c includes features to help businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk.
Since Enterprise Manager 12c was released in October 2011, the focus has been in three key areas – cloud lifecycle management, integrated stack management capabilities, and scaling up the Enterprise Manager framework itself for use in high scale, highly secure environments, said Dan Koloski, senior director of product management and business development in Oracle’s Systems and Applications Group. “This release, 12c Release 4, contains improvements in all three of those areas."
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog.
The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance.
In addition, said Koloski, “Across all of our cloud service offerings we have extended our chargeback and metering capabilities to allow them to be much more highly customized.” This is necessary because as organizations get into self service IT and chargeback and metering based on accessing share environments, they want to tightly control and customize how they think about chargeback in terms of different multipliers and different groupings, Koloski explained.
A lot of energy in this release has been focused on making it easier for customers to stand up their clouds so that they can more quickly get to using the clouds, said Koloski. This includes updates to rapid start kits. “You can essentially go from 0-to-cloud very quickly and start leveraging that cloud rather than spending time with set up,” said Koloski. This has been done for DBaaS to be deployed either on Exadata or on a generic hardware platform as well as for middleware as a service on Exalogic.
In the area of improved database and middleware management, a performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis to help identify database problems before they occur. The performance warehouse allows users to leverage data from the Automatic Workload Repository (used to collect performance statistics) over a more variable set of time periods so they can compars performance before and after changes, and do what-if scenarios, explained Koloski.
New enterprise data-governance capabilities also enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data to help Enterprise Manager administrators more actively maintain an inventory of sensitive or potentially sensitive data. And, step-by-step orchestration of upgrades, with the ability to rollback changes, enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c.
The latest release of Enterprise Manager also includes a new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators manage many as one, and apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly.
Supporting security and agility,the Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature exposes the instrumentation farther upstream in the software development lifecycle in a safe way, said Koloski. The feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization.
In addition, new automated provisioning for SOA also lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning more easily.
Finally, said Koloski, “For all those folks who live and die by alerts coming out of Enterprise Manager, we have the option for monitoring thresholds to be adapted as environments change.” This can be done in an automated way or administrators can be allowed to make the adjustment. That is a feature that applies to anything that is monitored by Enterprise Manager, said Koloski.
For customers that are not embarking on a private cloud journey, and there are plenty of those as well, he added, there has been improvements in IT efficiency that are the result in the tight coupling between management and the platform itself.
Enterprise Manager has a very active customer advisory board. “We take their feedback very seriously,” said Koloski.
More information is available about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4.