Formal Push For 10G

Although the vendor plans to debut the software this week at the OracleWorld Conference in San Francisco, it will remain mum about pricing until a later date, said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle server technology.

Oracle's 10G software stack comprises its database, application server and Enterprise Manager software.

Along with the software, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle plans to unveil the PartnerNetwork 10G Partner Initiative to help channel partners migrate customers to grid-computing systems using the 10G stack. The initiative provides ISVs, resellers, hardware partners and solution providers with tools, upgrades, migration and porting kits, technical road maps and other resources to use with the 10G database, application server and Enterprise Manager.

Oracle is touting 10G as a low-cost way to manage software in grid-computing environments, with specific functionality in each of the products to achieve that end, Kurian said. For example, in the 10G database and application server, there will be services that enable solution providers to view the behavior of grid software resources. On the database side, 10G will include capabilities for automated storage management, automatic backup and recovery, and "a continued evolution of clustering capabilities" to optimize the software to run in a grid environment with multiple nodes, Kurian said.

Further, Oracle's 10G Enterprise Manager will feature more support for software provisioning, life-cycle management, and centralized administration of databases and application servers across the grid.

All of the software within 10G will have self-management abilities, which "drastically lowers the cost of managing Oracle software," Kurian said.

Dan Mori, vice president of Oracle sales at Fusionstorm, a San Francisco-based solution provider, said 10G extends Oracle's 9i software with improved manageability, scalability, security and high availability.

"As a reseller and service provider, all of this will help our business in terms of not only sales but also from the professional services standpoint as customers go to implement grid-like [capabilities]," Mori said.

Solution providers say they see Oracle's 10G push as a way for Oracle to buck up its software play beyond the database and combat hardware players that provide a full software stack for developing, deploying and managing applications.

Since Oracle is third, behind BEA Systems and IBM, in application-server market share, they said an integrated software stack for grid computing gives it a niche in providing Java infrastructure software at a lower cost to small to midsize customers.

One East Coast solution provider, who requested anonymity, characterized the grid push as Oracle's attempt to "stick it to the hardware guys. Grid is a way to put a lot of little cheap computers together to act like one big computer,that's a way to boost performance cheaply," he said.

Oracle's on-again, off-again efforts to win over channel partners are not working, which may hinder 10G's adoption, he added.