Re: High Availability Options

On May 28, 1:20 pm, Pat <pat.ca..._at_service-now.com> wrote:
> So, I've been asked to propose a HA solution for an Oracle database.
> My original proposal was:
>
> Production RAC cluster in data center A
> DR Database (no cluster) in data center B
>
> I originally proposed Oracle Enterprise at both sites with dataguard
> being used to keep DR in synch with the prod cluster.
>
> Naturally, that particular configuration added up to some serious
> money (I don't recall the details, but I think we had 20+ LU's worth
> of Oracle Enterprise at $40k a pop). Probably not surprisingly, the
> customer came back and said "dear lord, can't you give us an HA
> architecture for less money?"
>
> Which brings me here. Are there any other best practises or
> recommended approaches for a High Availability Oracle configuration
> that don't rely on dataguard and Oracle Enterprise?

I'm fairly certain you can find various third-party products which promise to provide the same functionality, reliability and resilience, but I'd be putting my trust in RAC and Data Guard. I understand the cost factor, but why would you suggest a RAC production environment and not duplicate that same configuration at the disaster recovery site? My thoughts tend toward maintaining the same configuration at both ends of that 'pipe', to enable the end-users to move quickly to the same environment at a different location and provide the same or similar performance, as who knows how long the original production site might be offline for repairs and reconfiguration. The end-users could be running business from Bora Bora for weeks before the original production site in Bemidgi is back up and running; as another thought the old DR site might well become the new production site with the old prod environment used as the new DR.

I'd rather use the supplied functionality from Oracle rather than rely upon some third-party vendor application which may not be as robust as RAC and Data Guard. The initial cost may be less, but the cost of ownership of that third-party 'solution' may be much greater as reliability and data integrity could suffer as you end up fighting fires with the third-party software merely to get it to function, for however brief a time, as intended.

My two cents.

David Fitzjarrell Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 13:42:28 CDT