Oracle Grid Computing: Standardize

Every business today has a mix of server and storage technologies. By taking steps to move toward standardized servers and storage, you can significantly lower costs and in the process form the basis of a grid computing infrastructure.

Here are some of the grid computing technologies that revolutionize the cost of server and storage systems:
Processors - Low-cost, high volume Intel or AMD processors provide the benefits of proprietary processors at a fraction of the cost
Servers - Blade server technology reduces the cost of hardware and increases the density of servers
Networked storage - Network storage technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) further reduce disk storage costs
Network interconnects - Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel drives down the cost of connecting clusters of servers
Linux operating system - Linux provides a cost-effective and enterprise-ready operating system

Oracle Grid Computing: Consolidate

Another step toward grid computing is to consolidate your infrastructure in one or a few data centers. When you consolidate, you'll have fewer grids with larger pools of resources available for your applications. The larger grids also increase reliability and reduce management costs by as much as 20%.

Oracle 10g is the only infrastructure that has full grid server cluster capabilities for all applications–transaction processing (OLTP), decision support (DSS), and enterprise content management; only Oracle can run your existing applications in a grid computing environment–no rewrite required.
Consolidate your database systems and application servers and you'll lower incremental growth costs, achieve higher availability, have fewer upgrades and patches to apply, and improve your administrative productivity.

Oracle Grid Computing: Automate

Automate your grid so you can manage it effectively as it grows. Because enterprise grids can have hundreds, potentially thousands of servers, a grid is simply too large to be managed manually server-by-server.

Standardize on low-cost, commodity servers and storage Consolidate your databases, application servers, and storage Automate day-to-day management tasks

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g has automated the day-to-day maintenance required for an enterprise grid, and provides a centralized management console called Oracle Grid Control.
Software installation, patching, upgrading, workload balancing, security, and much more are all handled centrally from Oracle Grid Control. This means the entire infrastructure can be managed as one large computing system. One or a few administrators can maintain even the largest grid data center.