If you’re planning on retooling your business model to hang with the Cloud City set, anyone who has ever seen The Empire Strikes Back knows it can be fraught with peril (of the migration kind, not the losing your hand via lightsaber kind). Network latency-based timeouts, message delivery errors and performance and security risks are just a few of the cloud migration issues of which VARs need to be aware.

Oracle’s debut of Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is designed to reduce those risks, offering capabilities for establishing, managing and supporting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. The platform delivers centralized management for Oracle Engineered Systems, Oracle’s SPARC servers, Oracle’s x86 servers, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, Sun Server Networking and Oracle Virtualization (including Oracle VM for SPARC, Oracle VM for x86 and Oracle Solaris Zones).

Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c provides cloud life cycle management across Oracle hardware, Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris, including central management of virtualization technologies, self-service management of cloud life cycle and dynamic resource scheduling, while enhancements in My Oracle Support allow cloud administrators to benefit from Automatic Service Requests, proactive patch recommendations and health check.

The company also introduced the Ops Center Everywhere Program, through which users can download and use Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to manage Oracle systems for free. The program provides cloud control across applications, middleware, databases and hardware through built-in integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

Though the migratory path to cloud computing can still be a bumpy ride (beware of any sales agents named Lando; they might just double-cross you), reducing risks — be it with Oracle or any other platform — should help ensure vastly smoother sailing.