Chapter 1. Enterprise Manager Grid Control

The typical data center for a medium or large enterprise is composed of a myriad of technologies. One can see different types of hardware, operating systems, databases, middleware, integration servers, storage devices, and networking devices in any such data center. Such diversity of technologies and operating systems can be attributed to many factors, and some of them are:

We see that each factor for diversity in the data center has some business or strategic value. At the same time, such diversity makes management of the data center more complex. To manage such data centers we need a special product like Oracle's Enterprise Manager Grid Control that can provide a unified and centralized management solution for the wide array of products.

In any given data center, there are lots of repetitive operations that need to be executed on multiple servers (like applying security patches on all Oracle Databases). As data centers move away from high-end servers to a grid of inexpensive servers, the number of IT resources increases in the data center and so does the cost of executing repetitive operations on the grid. Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides solutions to reduce the cost of any grid by automating repetitive operations that can be simultaneously executed on multiple servers. Enterprise Manager Grid Control works as a force multiplier by providing support for executing the same operations on multiple servers at the cost of one operation.

As organizations put more emphasis on business and IT alignment, that requires a view of IT resources overlaid with business processes and applications is required. Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides such a view and improves the visibility of IT and business processes in a given data center. By using Enterprise Manager Grid Control, administrators can see IT issues in the context of business processes and they can understand how business processes are affected by IT performance.

In this chapter, we will get to know more about Oracle's Enterprise Manager Grid Control by covering the following aspects: