Oracle has extended the configuration management capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager, with new features that focus on managing application configurations. Oracle Enterprise Manager's "top-down" approach to application management enables customers to reduce complexity and increase efficiencies in their IT environments and optimally run their enterprise applications.
The new capabilities have been added to further simplify configuration management, improve service levels and enforce compliance for business-critical applications. These features are in addition to other recently announced configuration management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager, including real-time change detection; policies for key industry standards and best practices; and comprehensive compliance reporting. Observing that applications are probably the most important technology assets within an organization, Moe Fardoost, senior director of product marketing, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "We are introducing a unique capability that helps you look at configuration from an application perspective."
Specifically, the new features add capabilities that contribute to four key areas of Oracle Enterprise Manager's configuration management solution.
The solution provides discovery and tracking of IT assets and components, helping customers identify IT assets and their relationships to quickly remediate configuration issues. And, simplified management is achieved with a portfolio of more than 100 Oracle and non-Oracle configuration management templates, including templates for Linux, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM WebSphere, customers can more efficiently implement configuration management across the entire application deployment lifecycle. Oracle Change Manager also provides real-time change detection of unauthorized changes, helping customers to meet industry and regulatory compliance requirements. It also provides easy integration in complex environments, allowing customers to utilize existing IT investments, for example, by enabling closed-loop reconciliation on change requests across heterogeneous IT environments.
The templates are the starting point for managing the configurations of applications, emphasizes Fardoost. "If you think about it, something like Oracle's Siebel product for example, is a very complicated environment in terms of how many things are in it and if you wanted to manage that configuration you would have to obviously look at the various components within that environment. We make that simple by giving you the template so the starting point is automated for you. And then the other aspects kick in-such as the engine that is behind this template-driven configuration management, which is silently out there watching how your configuration in that environment, for Siebel for example, is changing, and as it changes, it notifies you-and policies can be set to enforce that configuration."
Another important aspect of the solution is configuration management in different environments during the deployment lifecycle. For example, says Fardoost, in moving an application from a test environment to distribute it for use, "you can take the exact configuration that you have tested and certified for your environment and you can replicate that in multiple places and you can track those multiple deployments across the deployment lifecycle so that things do not drift away from the configurations they are supposed to have." For more details, go here.