Solution overview

At the center of the “risk versus cost” challenge is the question “How can I increase application availability and resiliency while also aggressively managing costs?” The concept of using multiple data centers, with replicated system configurations, to provide fallback capabilities through redundancy has emerged as the preferred solution. This approach minimizes the impact of the total loss of one data center, but it achieves this through the gross underutilization of IT assets.

HP has addressed this issue with a unique and compelling blend of optimally utilized high-availability and disaster-tolerant solutions. HP has retained all the advantages of split data centers and is now offering solutions that virtually eliminate redundant, underdeployed resources. This includes support for Oracle RAC, which allows one of the world’s most popular databases to be deployed for high availability and scalability.

Oracle9i RAC allows multiple instances to access a single logical database across multiple servers, with all nodes able to concurrently execute transactions against the same database. However, for the systems to be housed in separate data centers, several other key solution components must be present. These components include data center connectivity, workload balancing, and a variety of service managers—for cluster arbitration, business policy enforcement, volume management, partitioning, mirroring and synchronization, and so on—as well as supporting hardware.

To illustrate the real-world feasibility of hosting a single logical database across multiple discrete data centers up to 100 km, HP enhanced its SGeRAC solution.

Solution components

The highly pervasive RAC configuration features comprehensive high-availability and scalability functionality. SGeRAC delivers the ability to perform identical operations across two remotely-located data centers and gives the configuration increased stability through additional high availability and disaster tolerance. In addition, it produces efficiency gains through the utilization of all dynamically- allocated resources.

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