Very Large Ear File Deployment

Our development team is in the final stages of completing a very large Oracle based J2EE application that runs on Oracle App Server 10g. The application will support about 4000 conncurrent users and it has in excess of 500 EJBs and 500 JSPs. The size of the ear file at this point (development is still not complete) is about 60 MB and takes hours to deploy and usually lead to the application server hanging and having to be restarted. We have a clsutered OC4J across multiple servers (hardware servers).

Our team is responsible for the application deployment in production and we do not see this as a very feasable approach as it will not support the idea of an emergency release since deployment takes hours and down time is not possible for this business critical application.

I need some ideas/input on different deployment strategies. I also would like to hear from anyone who is using Oracle App Server to support large mission critical applications with a large number of users and their strategy on application deployments.

Rgrds,

Nabil