Oracle Magazine - January/February 2012

monitors these information systems to ensure that they are online, up to date, and meeting customer requirements.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 g gives Epsilon a cohesive view of all Oracle Exadata components, either individually or in a consolidated snapshot. System administrators rely on this centralized management insight to monitor many database systems and attributes, eliminating “shadow management consoles” for independent database servers. Administrators throughout the company now have a common management interface for the entire Oracle-based infrastructure.

According to Tim Grieser, program vice president, enterprise system management software, at International Data Corporation (IDC), the latest Oracle Enterprise Manager release is optimized to support highly integrated “full stack” Oracle environments and engineered systems. “While Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c can be used to coordinate the provisioning of third-party infrastructure and hypervisors supporting Oracle databases, applications, and middleware, customers can anticipate the greatest cost savings, performance improvements, and productivity increases by implementing Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to manage full-stack Oracle environments,” he says.

Epsilon’s I T team is looking forward to implementing
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c in this context. White is
particularly interested in the product’s enhanced manage-
ment capabilities for Oracle engineered systems. “Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c monitors an entire Oracle Exadata or
According to Oracle’s Sarwal, Active Session History analytics is
just one of more than 200 new features and 500 enhancements
in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, many of which Oracle created in
response to specific requests from customers. “Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c is a transformative product,” he says. “It helps you do
everything, from creating a cloud to deploying it and charging back
for usage, along with capacity planning, self-service provisioning,
and management and monitoring of all the underlying compo-
nents. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c enables organizations to view
cloud resources as meaningful business services rather than iso-
lated I T components.” 

Jeff White, vice president, technology, Strategic Database Services, at Epsilon, says his company uses Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Exadata to provide real-time support for tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals at a large U. S. retailer.

generate large amounts of data that require transaction processing, tracking, configuring, offer/content targeting, personalization, logging, and campaign execution. With many of its information systems seeing 40 percent growth year over year and increased demand for real-time reporting and conversation with end users, Epsilon decided to deploy an Oracle Exadata Database Machine to meet strict performance and availability requirements for some of its client programs.

“Client needs for real-time data and near-real-time reports are in
high demand and growing,” says White. “We deliver highly available
and performing marketing solutions that adhere to strict SLAs that
govern the customer experience.”
White and his team used to spend considerable time architecting,
configuring, and deploying high-performance computing systems.
“We decided to purchase Oracle Exadata because we wanted an inte-
grated server, storage, and network solution, so we would not have
to manually select, configure, and validate hardware and software
configurations,” he notes.

PAUL S. HOWELL

Today Epsilon uses Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Exadata to support a large U.S. retailer, including providing real-time support for tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals, resulting in peak loads exceeding 500 Web service calls per second and reaching 200,000 IOPS [input/output operations per second]. Each Web service call can include tens to hundreds of transactions, yet these transactions average between 10 and 150 milliseconds, meeting the stringent expectations of true real-time data processing. White’s team closely