Application Server Clusters that can pool and virtualize run-time services; all services can be distributed across multiple machines in a grid, and new application server instances can be automatically added and started to deliver capacity on demand
Interaction with Oracle RAC to improve application reliability
Identity management features that provide centralized user administration, which is even more important in a grid environment
Ease of application deployment: Enterprise applications do not need to be redesigned, because when they are deployed on the Oracle Application Server 10g in a grid, the applications benefit immediately from the transparent workload distribution, load balancing, and scheduling necessary to coordinate work across multiple servers. JDeveloper 10g, available in Oracle Developer Suite 10g, enables applications to expose their behavior to other applications and to management tools through standardized interfaces, so that they can communicate with other applications and heterogeneous resources across a grid.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is the complete, integrated, central management console and underlying framework that automates administrative tasks across sets of systems in a grid environment. It enables:
Grouping of multiple hardware nodes, databases, application servers, and other targets into single logical entities
Software provisioning that automates installation, configuration, and cloning of Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Database 10g across multiple nodes, making it it possible to add capacity as needed or to easily patch and upgrade existing systems
Ease of application deployment: Applications can be deployed once to a single application server instance, registered with the central repository, then automatically deployed to all relevant nodes on the grid, with nodes being synchronized as changes are made.
Application Service Level Monitoring by viewing the availability and performance of the grid infrastructure as a unified whole so that performance or availability issues can be traced throughout the entire application, and the root cause can be determined by drilling down into the infrastructure
Note: For additional information about Oracle’s enterprise grid computing solution, see the Grid Technology Center on OTN: http://otn.oracle.com/tech/grid/index.html.