HP Automates Oracle Deployment

HP has enhanced the support for Oracle business applications by updating their Oracle configuration reference documentation and by adding templates to their Blade System Matrix to automate the provisioning of the underlying compute, network, and storage resources. HP claims to take infrastructure provisioning from hours or days to minutes. The new templates and reference configurations are available now.

This type of automation is the future of IT, and like most infrastructure vendors that partner with enterprise application vendors, HP maintains a set of reference documents that layout recommendations such as server size, storage allocation, networking configurations and software requirements for deploying business applications using HP equipment and software.

Manually provisioning all of the required resources is a time consuming task. With HP's Insight Dynamics VSE, application templates can be created that define the underlying infrastructure components. All that needs to be done is to define certain requirements, like networks and capacity, and Insight Dynamics will select the proper servers, deploy the OS, allocate the storage and provision the storage and network connections. Templates even set-up storage replication on the SAN.

Application templates can be imported into the  Matrix Orchestration Environment and you will likely need to edit the parameters such as defining resource pools, setting high availability and disaster recovery requirements, etc. The Matrix Orchestration Environment also contains editable workflows, where you define the required steps to deploy an application, ensuring your own operational requirements are met.

Once the template is deployed within Matrix Manager, Insight Dynamics VSE will monitor the deployment and make recommendations on scaling and disaster recovery. The Matrix Manager also allows you to dynamically add or remove resources to an application. To use flexible provisioning, you first create the entire server pool and install the required applications, then shut down the unused servers. When more resources are needed, you can bring the unused servers on-line.Unfortunately, the templates don't go so far as to deploy the selected Oracle applications. Administrators either do that manually or use some other software deployment product to automate the application installation. HP has demonstrated application provisioning using Templates, but is recommending using a software management tool to automate the application deployment.