Novell and Oracle announced availability of a new Accelerator service designed to help customers streamline the deployment of a Grid-ready infrastructure for the data center, featuring Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g for customers running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. The solution takes advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) and the Automated Storage Management feature of Oracle Database 10g to provide a complete, customer-ready management solution for monitoring and managing grid applications and infrastructure software and storage.

This new Accelerator is a service engagement wherein skilled personnel from Oracle will work with Novell, HP and Egenera to expedite implementation and deployment of Oracle's Grid computing infrastructure software onto SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Already field-proven with existing joint customers, this accelerator helps minimize risk while speeding time-to-market for enterprise grid-based applications. The new Accelerator is offered with flexible optional pricing designed to fit into customer budget and deployment requirements.

"Oracle and Novell share a common vision of providing a low-cost, high-performance computing platform for world-class enterprise data centers," said Dave O'Neill, group vice president of Oracle's Technology Business Unit. "In combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, we provide our customers with Grid infrastructure including Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Grid Control to support the demands of a modern business."

Roger Levy, Novell vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions, said, "We are excited to leverage the strength of our relationship with Oracle to help meet customer demand. "The scalability, stability and performance that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivers on the Oracle Grid Platform are major factors that have influenced many customers to deploy our joint solutions. This program will allow those customers, as well as future customers, to easily migrate to an industry-leading solution."