Oracle Gets 'Griddy'

Part of the game plan is a Framework Grid Control, which will be part and parcel of Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager. That software will be able to coordinate and look at all of the enterprise nodes and serve as a single point to evaluate the status of the overall system, said Benny Souder, vice president of distributed database development at Oracle.

In addition, Oracle is embedding bits and pieces of capability now found in the current Enterprise Manager into its 10g lineup from the database to the application server.

"We're shipping individual Enterprise Manager capabilities with each software component in 10g," Souder said at OracleWorld in San Francisco.

A big part of Oracle's message is building more management and provisioning smarts into each piece of software. The 10g database, for example, promises to manage storage for itself, allocating more storage resources as needed when they are needed.

"Grid is not about a bunch of stupid components, but smart components working together with a centralized control point," Souder said.

This enterprise "Grid Control" will, over time, be able to provision more and more computing resources as needed. Oracle is working on an automated grid framework to make this plugging in of additional components fairly easy, the company has said.

Oracle Vice President Thomas Kurian told CRN last week that the entire 10g lineup would ship by year's end. At OracleWorld, the company has not commented on packaging or pricing beyond that.

Oracle, which is fighting an aggressive database marketshare war with IBM and Microsoft, is trying to position its grid message as a more cost-effective response to IBM's on-demand computing message, althouth the net effect of the strategy would be the sale of more Oracle software. Many see that software as quite pricey in its own right. The margins are being bled out of hardware, management software and other components, observers have said.

Company spokesman Jim Finn characterized "grid" as a software-oriented architecture that will let users add capability in the form of cheap $2,000 and $3,000 server blades as needed. "On demand is more a financing model involving mainframes and consulting," Finn said.

Souder had similar repartee on IBM's autonomic or self-managing, self-healing, self-tuning message. "If I paid $5 million for a mainframe, I'd want it to heal itself too," Souder quipped.

IBM for more than a year has touted its on-demand strategy as a way for IT staffs to offer more or less capabilities as demand dictates.