Oracle Clustering

Oracle Servers form a crucial part of many organisations, and have traditionally run on high end proprietary hardware to ensure reliability and availability. In recent years however, there has been a move towards commodity Intel based hardware for cost and performance reasons.

Nordicmind can provide solutions allowing you to migrate to commodity hardware, while still maintaining the high availability features typically found with high end hardware.

With us you can gain the benefits of High Availability Clustering, at a fraction of the cost compared with e.g. Oracle's RAC or Microsoft's Cluster Server and with added functionality.

Our solutions offer features not available with traditional clustering products - for instance disaster recovery, LAN or WAN failover and the option of whether or not to use shared storage, while providing resiliance, enhancing availability and controlling cost.

Our solutions are typically built around SteelEye Technology's award winning LifeKeeper product, which has a 10 year production history and a prooven track record.

LifeKeeper offers a way of recovering Oracle databases in minutes. LifeKeeper for Oracle ties the data integrity of Oracle databases to the increased availability provided by LifeKeeper.

Oracle database failover

Oracle database files and resources are protected by monitoring key Oracle processes and file systems. When an Oracle database or dependent resources is detected not to respond, LifeKeeper initiates a recovery scenario that attempts recovery on the local server. If this recovery fails, then the database is recovered on the remote server.

The core LifeKeeper product assumes that shared storage will ensure data availability. If no shared storage is available then data availability must be ensured via LifeKeeper Data Replication.

Oracle RAC or Oracle Enterprise Edition are not required to recover Oracle databases with LifeKeeper.

Data Replication - eliminating the need for Shared Storage

LifeKeeper data replication replicates data from a local disk located on an active server to a local disk located on a backup server.

Data replication is only required when there is no shared storage available. Data is continually updated synchronously or asynchronously, to a backup disk on the second server.

When recovery on the backup server takes place, data is up-to-date due to the replication that has already taken place. An additional benefit of replicating the data is that a backup of the data is always available online in case of disk or hardware failure.

Disaster Recovery Oracle Databases to a remote site

Oracle disaster recovery provides automated replication of Oracle databases to a remote site and failover to a remote site. Remote recovery involoves:

• Asynchronously and reliably replicating data over a WAN
• Reliably monitoring Oracle databases
• Switching over to a remote site if a site disaster occurs
• Access to Oracle resources is recovered in minutes

When the original site becomes available, LifeKeeper will automatically replicate data to it, and once the local data is up to date, a switchover back to the primary node can take place.

The data replication software provides added benefits, for example a mirror can be paused and a backup taken of it, without affecting the active node, and helping to guarentee the integrity of the backup. The mirror can then be resumed, and only updated data on the primary node will be copied across.

Running multiple instances of Oracle

There is no need to have redundant servers in a cluster using LifeKeeper as each node can be active. This could be by having multiple instances of Oracle within a cluster, or it could be by running a separate application on the backup server such as Apache.

Java GUI administration

A Java GUI simplifies administration, configuration and management of the failover and data replication process. This can be done via the console or through a web browser

Original Source: www.openminds.co.uk