Standby Instance questions and HA

Hi,
  I was reading in the book "Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques" about Standby Instances.

Note, this is not a standby database.

>From the book it seams to work in the following way...

There is only one database.
The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk.

The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link.

I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)?

Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost?

We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible.

We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?).

The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site.

Has anyone any recommendations?

Thanks,

Jim

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