Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 adds features to support rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog.
The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. There are also out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance.
“Across all of our cloud service offerings, we have extended our chargeback and metering capabilities to allow them to be much more highly customized,” noted Dan Koloski, senior director of product management and business development in Oracle’s Systems and Applications Group, in a recent interview. This is necessary because as organizations get into self service IT and chargeback and metering based on accessing share environments, they want to tightly control and customize how they think about chargeback in terms of different multipliers and different groupings, Koloski explained.
A lot of energy in this release has been focused on making it easier for customers to stand up their clouds so that they can more quickly get to using the clouds, said Koloski. This includes updates to rapid start kits. “You can essentially go from 0-to-cloud very quickly and start leveraging that cloud rather than spending time with set up,” said Koloski. This has been done for DBaaS to be deployed either on Exadata or on a generic hardware platform as well as for middleware as a service on Exalogic.
Since Enterprise Manager 12c was released in October 2011, the focus has been in three key areas – cloud lifecycle management, integrated stack management capabilities, and scaling up the Enterprise Manager framework itself for use in high scale, highly secure environments, said Koloski. “This release, 12c Release 4, contains improvements in all three of those areas."