The Oracle (database) platform is very strategic for most of our customers. The reliability of this platform is essential and High Availability (HA) is on the wish list for many of them.
Oracle provides an extensive list of options, like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Data Guard and Flashback technology, to tackle the broad variety of causes for downtime. These options are combined in a blueprint for HA called the Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA). MAA provides best practices and recommendations for high availability.
Example of an HA Configuration using MAA Best Practices (source oracle.com)
When discussing availability, the first response is usually something like “We’ve been running the database for years now and we’ve never had serious downtime”. Further investigation often reveals a lingering uncertainty about the factual situation - “what is the availability status of my database setup?” – and a wish list for a more guaranteed quality. With MAA as a guideline, we can help our customers optimize their availability.
All the options in MAA can be intimidating for smaller sites. Still, HA doesn’t have to be only for the super large enterprise customers. Customers can gain great improvements using a pragmatic, smart approach and ocusing on “right availability”. Pick the right high availability options to your needs, demands. your budget and the skills of the IT team. You could call it Maximum Available & Manageable Architecture (MAMA) instead of MAA.
At the Data Infrastructure Technology Day (Houten – June 22nd, 2010) from Oracle, I presented the customer case of Provincie Zeeland. They wanted to implement a disaster recovery solution to increase the availability of their database platform. Because a limited downtime was permitted, Active Data Guard proved to be a great solution. With Active Data Guard, the fail-over infrastructure can be used for read-only usage, like reporting and backup, at all times. All hardware is used, reducing the load on the primary production system and thus giving Active Data Guard a very strong ROI.
Whitehorses is specialized in succesfully implementing Oracle SOA solutions: BPEL, OSB, WebLogic & BPM