Oracle enables grid computing for enterprises

BANGALORE: Come December 2003, Oracle India Private Limited (Oracle India) will launch the Oracle 10g infrastructure software for Indian enterprises. Oracle 10g enables organisations to implement utility computing, based on grid computing technology, which is being made commercially available to enterprises for the first time, ever.

The Oracle 10g infrastructure software comprises Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, and Oracle Developer Suite 10g. Oracle 10g will allow Indian companies optimize usage of their IT infrastructure, thus increasing, tremendously, productivity and return on IT investments.

Shekhar Dasgupta, managing director, Oracle India said, "Oracle 10g is the only infrastructure software available for enterprise grid computing. The advantage is the architecture - complete and integrated - unique to Oracle."

"Our India Development Center (IDC) has played a significant role in the development of Oracle 10g. Teams from IDC worked hand in hand with their counterparts in Oracle's global development centre at Redwood Shores to develop the components of Oracle 10g infrastructure software," he added.

Existing customers of Oracle who are under the annual support contract for earlier versions of Oracle software will be entitled to a free upgrade to Oracle 10g. The price of Oracle 10g products will remain the same as the Oracle 9i suite of products.

"Our business requires a software architecture that has high availability, and facilitates intense, real-time processing. Oracle 10g-software infrastructure gives us all these benefits with its grid computing capabilities, said G M Shenoy, senior vice president, NSE.IT Limited.

"Oracle Database 10g, which has automated storage management capability, has a vast improvement in database manageability features and will helps us save time and resources, he added.

The grid computing technology will allow Oracle India's customers, to provide high quality of service at lowest cost by harnessing, as needed, the power of the total computing capacity present in a cluster of computers, so that any available server can rapidly process and solve problems. It creates an illusion to the user that all servers on the network are one large computer, available to all users and applications.

Oracle India has chalked out an aggressive marketing strategy for the new products.

"Oracle10g holds a lot of promise for the SME organisations in India. The highly automated and self-managing nature of the Oracle Database 10g means that smaller organisations have to invest less time and money on managing the information within their organisation. With the introduction of Oracle Database Standard Edition One 10g, the smaller organisations can also adopt Oracle Database 10g technology at a very low entry cost," said Somesh Bhagat, marketing director, Oracle India.

Oracle grid computing builds on 14 years of grid technology development in academia and extends it to enterprise customers. Oracle grids run real packaged applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and other ISV applications from vendors such as PeopleSoft and SAP.

Because enterprise grid computing requires simplified storage management, transparent server clustering, and highly automated software, Oracle Grid Computing takes customers and partners a giant step toward making utility computing, which is like turning on a tap for water, a reality.

Enterprise grid computing can dramatically reduce the time, labour and cost of IT management by pooling industry-standard commodity servers, storage and software.

As a result, companies can use the power of their entire system, or computing grid, for several projects, rather than continuing to purchase more capacity for separate projects.

Traditional IT infrastructures leave organizations with "islands" of computing resources and software that are difficult to integrate and manage. Systems were designed to handle peak loads that might occur once per quarter or per year.

As a result, IT infrastructures often became very inefficient. Oracle Grid Computing addresses this business challenge by helping customers reduce the time, labour and cost of IT operations by pooling industry standard servers and storage into an adaptable infrastructure that can meet changing business demands.