Book Image

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos

By : PORUS HOMI HAVEWALA
Book Image

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos

By: PORUS HOMI HAVEWALA

Overview of this book

Data centers around the world are experiencing an unprecedented era of growth due to expanding data volumes. There is also a corresponding increase in the number of databases and applications. In such rapid-growth centers, it is inevitable that fighting fires daily becomes a common occurrence. There is often no controlled method of performance management, neither is rapidly changing configuration information collected. With the lack of automation and control, Data Centers do not often realize their intended cost-effectiveness and regress into a chaotic and uncontrolled day-to-day type of existence. This was the case until Oracle Enterprise Manager started being used as an Enterprise-wide central management solution, changing the whole game in the process. In this brand new book by Porus Homi Havewala, one of the leading experts in the Oracle space, you will be introduced to the all-encompassing world of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, Oracle's premier product for managing and monitoring the Enterprise space. Drawing from the author's many years of experience in the real world, the book brings together the major capabilities of the latest Enterprise Manager software and demonstrates how to ease the growing pains of Data Centers. The book takes you on a descriptive journey of what issues are normally experienced in the Data Center, and how Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c manages to address and resolve many of the issues. The book introduces the reader to the typical chaos in Data Centers and discusses the way these common issues are normally resolved, by manual labor or manual scripting using extensive human resources. Then it will show you how Cloud Control 12c aids in Database Performance Management, Configuration Management, Security Compliance, Automated Provisioning, Automated Patching and Database Change Management. You will learn how Cloud Control 12c allows Exadata Database Machine Monitoring and Management, Test Data Management for data subsetting of large databases, as well as Sensitive Data De-identification using Data Masking. The book includes various real life examples and case studies of actual Oracle customers to show how they have benefited from using Oracle Enterprise Manager. It explores the strong standing of Oracle in the Enterprise Management game, now also strengthened by the new Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12: Managing Data Center Chaos
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Chaos at Data Centers

Studies show that many corporations world wide expect their IT footprint to grow in the coming years. They expect more servers, more databases, more data, and more of everything.

They require more floor space in their data centers, and correspondingly a greater power footprint. Have you heard of a data center where no more servers can be added as the power supply has reached its limit, or the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can no longer cope? This story is not new, it happened a few years ago.

The growth seems to be endless—and this is fuelled by today's information age, where larger and larger volumes of data need to be stored and distributed to satisfy an ever-growing demand. More applications are using those databases, on more and more application servers.

So, for an IT manager, this will mean more of everything in his/her data centre. There may be different hardware platforms, different operating systems, for example, Solaris, Linux, IBM AIX, or Microsoft Windows, and in each such case there may be different versions such as the different flavors of Linux supplied by different vendors, including Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, SUSE Linux, and so on.

In the database arena, if a company has no policy of standardization for one particular database vendor, there may be different databases, such as Oracle, IBM DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server, in use by different projects.

Even if the databases belong to only one vendor, for example Oracle, the databases may be of different versions, such as Oracle Database 9i, 10g, or 11g. In the real world, it is very difficult to standardize on one version, as all applications may not be certified to use on that one database version. You may have some application vendors that say they are certified on Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 and not 10.2.0.5, and some that say they only use a particular version of Oracle Database 11g Release 1 and no other version.

So multiple database versions need to be installed separately, managed, patched as required, and upgraded when required. Also, development as well as test, staging, and production environments need to be provisioned (created) for each such database version. This level of complexity is the ground reality in today's data centers.