NEW YORK — Organizations running a lot of Oracle gear and software could now get some management assistance from a software program that Oracle has made free for customers.
The newest version of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, released last week, is now available free for any organization with an Oracle Premier Support agreement, under a new initiative called the Ops Center Everywhere Program..
“This product no longer requires a stand-alone software license. It is now included in your support for your other Oracle products,” said Steve Wilson, Oracle vice president of systems management.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c also includes a number of updated capabilities for managing Oracle Solaris 11, and is also the first version to allow administrators to manage both x86- and Oracle SPARC-based servers from a single console–the first commercial product to offer this capability, according to Oracle.
With the release of this software, “Oracle is strengthening its management support for SPARC and X86 Oracle Solaris 11 systems while also advancing management support for Oracle hardware, virtualization and cloud environments,” said Tim Grieser, analyst and program vice president covering enterprise system management for IDC.
In particular, software would help organizations maintain “complete stack management” for private clouds and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) deployments, Grieser said. “Other cloud tools focus only on the hypervisors,” but Ops Center also includes tools to manage the Oracle networking and storage gear and software as well, Wilson said.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager line of systems management software, is designed to help administrators manage IT infrastructure, offering the ability to control and configure servers, storage and networking equipment, operating systems and hypervisors. Organizations can manage all Oracle systems technologies from a single console, while eliminating, or at least minimizing, the need for third-party management software.
This version of the software accommodates the fresh features in the newest version of Solaris, released in November. Specifically, the new software allows administrators to use Solaris Image Packaging System (IPS), Automated Installer (AI) and Alternate Boot Environments across multiple servers. Instead of patching live Solaris deployments, administrators can apply a patch to the backup, test it, and then copy over the live version of the OS while it is still running. Ops Center also takes advantage of the new Solaris networking stack, which allow administrators, for instance, to specify how much bandwidth each virtual network interface can use.
The software package also comes with more controls for managing specific Oracle systems, such as Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
