Executive summary

The concept of optimized resource utilization has moved to the forefront of every IT organization’s agenda. The maturation of the clustering market has forced hardware vendors to differentiate their products to gain a competitive edge. Consequently, these vendors have begun to offer some variant of virtualization as the latest trend in high-availability capabilities.

Traditionally, every IT manager was confronted with the dilemma of having to balance risk and cost. Reducing risk in an IT environment necessarily came at high costs; conversely, lowering one’s costs engendered substantial risks. The prevailing model for risk reduction focuses on the duplication of critical computing components, the elimination of single points of failure, and the potential use of a secondary facility to continue operations in the event of a catastrophic loss of a primary data center.

Although this approach demonstrates diligence toward risk management, it also comes at the expense of duplicative and underutilized resources. HP Extended Cluster for RAC (Real Application Clusters)1 now addresses part of this utilization shortfall by taking advantage of the advancement in virtualization technologies. HP is regarded as the industry leader for virtualization and is continually raising the bar on optimized resource utilization.

The HP product line encompasses both high-availability and disaster-tolerant solutions. Coupled with its powerful virtualization capabilities, HP is the only vendor offering products that seamlessly integrate the three concepts of high availability, disaster tolerance, and virtualization. To illustrate this compelling value proposition, this white paper will examine the HP solution for Oracle® RAC.

HP Extended Cluster for RAC combines the high-availability product, HP Serviceguard Extension for RAC (SGeRAC) and the disaster-tolerant solution, HP Extended Campus Cluster. Moreover, when integrated with BEA WebLogic Server and virtualization tools, the net result is a compelling solution that specifically addresses risk reduction and capitalizes on IT investment in any environment that uses an Oracle9i RAC database.

HP Extended Cluster for RAC enables a single Oracle database to be shared across two data centers, up to a distance of 100 km. Because the two sites are functioning as a single virtual entity, all resources can be utilized at all times. The ability to meld distributed IT components into a homogeneous resource pool is made possible by the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) portfolio of solutions.

Virtualization enables full resource utilization within an enterprise while still maintaining previous levels of availability and data protection. Because data is replicated and synchronized between data centers, the entire computing environment is said to function as a single virtual entity. A distance of 100 km between the data centers, for instance, will not preclude an administrator from managing the application and data as if it were a traditional RAC application located in a single data center. Thus, whether an IT environment is located in one data center or across two or more, HP solutions are designed to protect mission-critical applications against hardware and software failures, planned or unplanned.

With the VSE, HP has created a unique solution that provides unrivaled levels of risk management and return on IT investment, and it has simultaneously enhanced an enterprise’s ability to rapidly accommodate and capitalize on volatile business conditions.

By extending a RAC solution over distance with more efficient use of resources, HP has demonstrated that global virtualization has arrived.

1Oracle RAC technology allows multiple instances of an application to access a single logical database across multiple servers, with all nodes able to concurrently execute transactions against the same database.

2