Univa Puts Oracle E-Business Suite In Cloud

Univa UD, a pioneer of grid and cloud management, will demonstrate how applications in the Oracle E-Business Suite can be run remotely in a cloud rather than in an on-site data center and still be effectively managed by the customer.

Univa will set up shop at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, in the Sun Microsystems booth on the Moscone Center exhibit hall floor. There it will be running E-Business Suite, the set of enterprise business applications used by many Oracle customers, on a cluster of Sun hardware managed by Oracle Real Application Clusters. Oracle Openorld ends October 15.

The purpose of the demonstration is to show that an Oracle customer can run the suite in a cloud setting, whether a private cloud on premises or in an external public cloud, and still manage them through the Univa's UniPortal and Reliance software. "We can watch the infrastructure or the applications. We can manage service level agreements," without being in the same locations as the applications, said Gary Tyreman, VP of products and alliances.

By putting E-Business Suite in the cloud, customers gain the ability to manage applications in a more automated fashion. Users may self-provision with application services as they need them, and monitoring of application performance could be automated, Tyreman said in an interview.

UniPortal is a portal through which E-Business Suite users would activate applications and assign them machine resources. Reliance is a monitoring system that can not only tell the user how well the application is running, but apply business rules to it to ensure it performs as expected. If the need arises, Reliance can assign more resources or a server with greater speed to the workload to ensure it meets the demands placed on it.

In the demonstration, E-Business Suite will be running in Oracle VM virtual machines, a version of the Xen open source hypervisor, but Tyreman said Univa is capable of managing other types of virtual machines as well.

The E-Business Suite shouldn't be confused with Oracle's own OnDemand set of online applications running in the Oracle data center and available as a service to customers. The Univa demo is meant to supply an example of how standard business applications can gain the self-provisioning, self-monitoring and ability to meet elastic demand by running them in a cloud-like manner.

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