AFTER weeks of hype, Oracle Corp on Monday unveiled details of its long- awaited grid computing strategy which the company is counting on to increase revenue and market share.
The new grid infrastructure software - Oracle Database 10g, Application Server 10g and Enterprise Manager 10g - are designed for enterprise grids and hailed as the next-generation computing.
With the new software, Oracle is intensifying the battle against rivals like International Business Machines Corp and Microsoft Corp, both of which reportedly gained ground last year in sales of databases that run Unix and Windows operating systems.
"This is a key milestone in our battle against IBM," said Oracle's executive vice president Chuck Phillips.
"While IBM's e-business on demand strategy is designed to create hardware capacity, Oracle's grid capabilities leverages exisiting capacity whereby the Oracle Grid will find the unused computing capacity in the network or grid, and execute the additional applications based on the capacity," he said in his keynote address at Oracle's annual user conference, which the company estimated was the biggest ever with 20,000 participants and 300 journalists.
Phillips said Oracle has been building on extensions of the grid computing concept for the last 10 years, devoting a "substantial" portion of its research and development (R&D) budget over the last four years on grid capabilities.
Grid computing, he added, is a steady march towards software as a service and a fundamental building block for utility computing (also known as e-business on demand or adaptive, dynamic or organic computing whereby computing is offered as a utility) offered by hardware vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc, and software vendors like Veritas Corp, BMC Software Corp, Computer Associates Inc and Microsoft.
Grid computing infrastructure pools large numbers of servers and storage into flexible resources for all enterprise computing needs and continually analyses demand for resources and adjusts supply accordingly.
According to Phillips, the launch of Oracle's grid computing is timely as businesses face the pressure to standardise on low-cost high-density modular servers and storage based on technologies such as blade servers, Intel Itanium processors and Linux, and consolidation of clusters of servers and storage shared among one or more data centres.
Targeted at large businesses, service providers, and academic research environments that offer utility computing, Oracle Database 10g introduces self-management capabilities and a Web-based console called Database Control.
It includes a self-diagnostic engine that automatically identifies any performance or operational problems and recommends corrective action.
Database Control can even identify poorly written application code, suggest a better one, and automatically tune the database to provide optimal performance.
Oracle Application Server 10g is the middleware solution that offers enhanced integration and Web services capabilities, enabling users to respond rapidly to changing business requirements such as integrating applications and Web services, or increasing computing resources within an enterprise grid to process payroll every month.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g is designed to help users reduce cost and complexity of managing business applications with an automated management software that provides a complete view of a company's computing resources.
System administrators can enforce policies, manage service levels, and rebalance existing computing resources and applications as business requirements change. It includes Oracle Grid Control which helps administrators to reduce the complexities of managing multiple servers in a cluster and automate the management of computing resources.
Oracle's grid capabilities support all mainframes, Unix, Windows and Linux servers and can integrate applications and data held in non-Oracle systems into a grid.
Analysts believe the company's attractive new packaging will entice the mid-market while at the same time ensure the high-end market is not cannibalized.