Oracle today announced it has updated its core management platform to provide capabilities that make it easier to manage a hybrid cloud computing environment spanning millions of endpoints.
The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) 13c, in addition to greater scalability, also provides support for dynamic groups, dynamic runbooks, automated workload analysis, monitoring templates, event compression and other capabilities that make it easier to manage IT operations at scale.
Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) 13c Release 5 also extends the reach of the management platform further into the realm of packaged Oracle applications and integrated hardware and software platforms such as Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (ZDLRA) and Private Cloud Appliance (PCA).
Oracle has also updated the compliance framework it includes with Oracle Enterprise EM to support additional regulatory requirements and refreshed the user interface for the fleet management tool provided.
Finally, the company is adding a tool that makes it easier to copy data stored within Oracle EM 13c to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service. Dubbed OCI bridge, this tool copies data to an OCI object store where it is accessed by OCI services such as logging analytics and operations insights.
Mughees Minhas, vice president of product management for enterprise and cloud manageability at Oracle, said as hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve, the need for a single management platform that spans infrastructure, databases and applications is becoming more apparent.
Minhas said Oracle EM 13c is part of larger observability initiative that Oracle has embraced to provide more context across disparate services in a way that reduces the total number of tools an IT team needs to deploy and master. That effort complements a series of autonomous computing initiatives Oracle has previously launched that eliminates the need for database administrators (DBAs) to manage lower level systems administration tasks such as performance tuning. In general, Oracle is making a case for an IT world where platforms are co-managed by Oracle and internal IT teams that are focused on higher-level tasks.
As IT environments become more distributed it’s clear IT is becoming more complex to manage. The issue that IT teams need to come to terms with is to what degree can they automate management tasks that today conspire to limit the size of the IT environment any given IT team can effectively manage. DevOps teams, of course, have been ruthlessly automating application development and deployment tasks for years. That philosophy is now being extended to include a broader range of IT operations tasks being automated by vendors themselves.
Each IT team will ultimately need to decide just how many automation platforms it requires. In many cases, IT teams are now struggling to unite various islands of automation that have now emerged within their organization. Regardless of approach, however, rote tasks that once consumed hours, sometimes days to complete, are now no longer required which, theoretically at least, should leave more time to focus on more complex challenges that are getting thornier by the day.
