"While IT systems have become more strategic and integral to the core business, they also have become more complex, and more difficult and costly to manage," said Carl Olofson, program director for information and data management software research at IDC. "Oracle Database 10g represents a great stride forward, introducing new self-managing features that help automate statistics collection, instance tuning, memory tuning, and more. Helping customers automate daily, routine administrative tasks greatly reduces the management burden, and that can translate into substantial cost savings and more effective database administration."

Oracle Grid Computing builds on 10 years of grid technology development in academia and extends it to enterprise customers. Oracle grids run packaged applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and other ISV applications from vendors such as PeopleSoft and SAP. Because enterprise grid computing requires simplified storage management, transparent server clustering, and highly automated software, Oracle Grid Computing takes users and partners a giant step toward making utility computing a reality.

"We like what we've seen with the direction Oracle is taking for enterprise grid computing," said Rick Brauen, senior manager, Database Services, Amazon.com. "The ability to manipulate and reallocate database workloads within a cluster based on the peaks and valleys of our normal business cycles will be invaluable to us in maximizing our IT investments while meeting ever-increasing service level requirements."

"Grid computing represents a significant new technology direction for the IT industry and Oracle is leading the way in how information and applications are delivered in this environment," said Charles Rozwat, executive vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle Corporation. "Oracle Database 10g is a major milestone in realizing this grid vision while providing many immediate benefits to Oracle customers such as improved performance and lower management costs."

The new offerings aim to address the following areas:

Automatic Management and Database Control. Enterprise grid computing will help users to build large-scale computing capacity from standardized components such as clusters of server blades and rack-mounted storage. Management automation are required to make this feasible. To meet these new requirements, Oracle Database 10g introduces advanced self-management capabilities and a new Web-based console called Database Control.

Database Clustering. At the heart of Oracle Grid Computing is its database clustering technology, Oracle Real Application Clusters. With the new Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g, deploying and managing database clusters as an enterprise grid is made easier with the introduction of integrated clusterware. Integrated clusterware is a set of common clustering services built into Oracle Database 10g to simplify the creation and operation of database clusters. In the past, running Oracle Real Application Clusters on different platforms - UNIX, Linux, Windows - required detailed and technical knowledge of cluster operations for each platform. Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g now includes all the clustering software needed to easily install, configure and run clusters predictably and efficiently on all supported platforms.

Integrated Storage Management. Oracle Database 10g introduces Automatic Storage Management (ASM), new software designed to greatly simplify storage configuration and management for the database. ASM hides the underlying complexity of how the database deals with data files and storage subsystems. It also automatically distributes the storage workload to get the best possible system performance. ASM eliminates the need to constantly monitor storage systems for "hot spots" or performance bottlenecks that often slow down data processing.