Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

“Integrating [systems
management and support]
will make it easier to understand
all of our deployed software
and patches.”

—Mervyn Lally, Global Director of Business Development, Ingersoll Rand

United States and two in Europe. A big part of this effort involves automating many of its management practices.

“Our goal is to better understand our assets, especially the Oracle products and services and the appliances they run on, in order to maximize utilization across datacenters,” explains Mervyn Lally, global director of business development at Ingersoll Rand. Lally and his team support more than 40 Oracle E-Business Suite instances and more than 800 Oracle databases. To manage these and other Oracle products, the company has standardized on Oracle Enterprise Manager and has been beta-testing Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 g, focusing on integrated systems management and support functions.

“Systems management and support are treated differently in
most IT environments, which makes it difficult to be proactive,”
points out Lally. “Integrating these two functions will make it easier
to understand all of our deployed software and patches.”
Lally thinks the integration of My Oracle Support and Oracle
Enterprise Manager 11 g will simplify activities for system
administrators and DBAs by enabling them to manage systems
and support interactions from one console. With Oracle Enterprise
Manager 11 g, Ingersoll Rand prepopulates service requests with

Mervyn Lally, global director of business development at Ingersoll Rand, says he believes the integration of My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g will simplify activities for system administrators and DBAs.

Organizations are deploying Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g to take advantage of business-driven IT management. But what does that mean, and how does it differ from other systems management solutions?

“Traditional systems management products don’t address
the complexities of modern datacenters. They create islands of
automation but do not provide a holistic, integrated picture of
the health of the entire IT stack,” says Richard Sarwal, senior vice
president of product development at Oracle. “Oracle Enterprise
Manager 11 g helps I T deliver greater business value, in addition to
greater IT efficiency and productivity.”
To do this, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 g delivers three new
capabilities:

•;Business-driven;application;management;enables;IT;to;be;more responsive to business priorities and deliver greater business value by managing to key metrics for user experience and business transactions.

•;Integrated;application-to-disk;management;simplifies;manage-ment by eliminating the need to use multiple tools at every layer of the stack, while maximizing return on I T investment.

•;Integrated;systems;management;and;support;allow;IT;to;be more proactive and efficient through knowledge sharing with Oracle Support Services and the broader Oracle community. Business-Driven IT Management

configuration information from Oracle Enterprise Manager and tracks those requests by configuration or target type, speeding up the resolution process.

“Oracle Support makes a wealth of information available, but
previously it was not directly available to Oracle Enterprise Manager,”
he says. “The new integration capabilities of Oracle Enterprise
Manager 11 g permit everyone to look at the same place to see the
state of the I T infrastructure and the health of our systems.”
Ingersoll Rand also benefits from Oracle Enterprise Manager’s
new capabilities for patching and updating software. In addition
to improving efficiency, Lally says these capabilities are key to
upholding the company’s security requirements.

“Previously, we would only patch an environment during scheduled downtimes or at the start of a new project,” he explains. “This would involve a lot of manual analysis, investigation of potential conflicts, and requests for merged patches, if needed. Now we have an at-a-glance, up-to-date view across our systems of all patch levels and recommended patches.” W