Need High Availability Solution Answer.

From: <humorous_at_my-deja.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 23:27:45 GMT
Message-ID: <91e9db$q28$1@nnrp1.deja.com>

Hey Gurus,
Here are some of the facts of the situation:

This is a new database and hardware/software will be purchased to support this recommendation
Database needs to be able to scale to 500GB, and maybe more.
We will most likely implement a Sun Solaris/Oracle solution
They claim to be making frequent writes to the database
The database needs to be highly available 24/7/365
Need capability to migrate database to backup database server and make that database server active. (for rolling in production database changes with minimal downtime)
Database will be accessed via 3-tier web server/app server/db server scheme
two production environments with identical hardware configuration (one active, the other used as a staging environment) When staging environment is upgraded, the active and staging environment switch roles.

Here are some of the questions that we need help with:

Disk storage:

Should we recommend a SAN or cross-connected A5200's? Shoule we use files or raw partitions?

High availability:

    Should we recommend SunCluster or Oracle Parallel Server or both?     (The local Oracle resource thinks OPS introduces too much      complexity into the environment.)
    Or should we recommend Oracle replication?     Or should we recommend a standby database?     Active/Passive v. Active/Active
    How long does it take for each of these strategies to failover?

Whatever we recommend, we are probably going to have to build as well and will need someone like yourself to come to Dallas to help us during the implementation phase of this project. If you are interested in working on this piece of the project, please let me know.

OK, Here's the million dollar question:

Is it possible to setup a redundant array of N+1 database servers that serve out the same database? I am looking for a configuration that would allow me to add a database server when I need additional capacity without modifying the application. This is probably a pure computer science question and I am not aware of any solutions in this problem space. I figured if anyone would have an idea on how to set this up, it would be you guys.

                         thanks a lot,
                                Taptriv

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http://www.deja.com/ Received on Fri Dec 15 2000 - 17:27:45 CST