RAC

Enterprises today require 99.9+% availability for their business applications. Immediate response times and trouble free operation are expected. An Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) implementation will provide a highly available and scalable environment.

With Oracle RAC, multiple database instances that each run on a physically separate node share access the same database (files) residing on common, resilient storage. If any node goes down, the database and application will continue without intervention. Oracle RAC can also scale by adding nodes, balancing the load across the cluster and even allow the provisioning of processors on demand.

Though generally a "high end" solution, Oracle RAC is also finding a place in the enterprise in smaller systems when absolute redundancy is required, but budgets are tight. Oracle Database Standard Edition includes RAC at no additional charge and can be a fit.

We can support you in your quest for high availability and/or scalability by providing expertise in the design and implementation of an optimal and cost effective Oracle RAC solution.

We have experience with file-based protocols (NAS: 11g Direct NFS, CIFS), Block-based protocols (SAN/iSAN: Fibre Channel, iSCSI) and High-speed transport implementations on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems.

All components of a carefully executed RAC architecture can be provided including server (OS) preparation, installation, scripting, network setup, Oracle Cluster Ready Services software (CRS), and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) as appropriate.

Data Guard

If your business is seeking a cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery solution, Oracle Data Guard is the most effective and comprehensive solution available today. Oracle Data Guard will protect your Oracle Database against planned and unplanned downtimes by creating physical and/or logical standby databases.

Oracle Data Guard is a comprehensive management, monitoring, and automation software infrastructure that creates, maintains, and monitors one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and corruptions.

Oracle Data Guard maintains these standby databases as “transactionally consistent" copies of the primary database. Standby databases (up to nine) can optionally be located at geographically remote sites miles away from your production data center. If for any reason your business’s critical production database becomes unavailable, Oracle Data Guard can switch any standby database to the primary role, minimizing downtime associated with the outage and preventing any data loss.

We provide solution support for enterprise ready logical and physical standby databases using Oracle Data Guard.

Recovery Manager (RMAN)

RMAN is Oracle's recommended database backup toolset. It offers many advantages over user-managed backups and is an integral part of any Oracle maximum availability architecture.

RMAN uses server sessions to perform backup and recovery operations and stores metadata about backups in a repository. RMAN offers many advantages over typical user-managed backup methods, such as the ability to do online database backups without placing tablespaces in backup mode; support for incremental backups; data block integrity checks during backup and restore operations; and the ability to test backups and restores without actually performing the operation. RMAN automates all backup and recovery for your Oracle database.

For your enterprise, we provide services to design and assist in your migration to RMAN. We provide mentoring, standards, scripting and testing of proven backup and recovery strategies to meet the availability goals of your enterprise.