Oracle Real Application Clusters Solution

Oracle RAC SolutionOracle Corporation introduced database clustering with Oracle version 6.2 exclusively on the DEC VAX/VMS. We will deal with many details of Oracle RAC in later and see how it provides for high availability and scalability.

Essentially, Oracle RAC provides the ability for multiple servers to consistently access a single copy of the data. Theoretically, as the requirement to access this single copy increases, you keep adding nodes to the cluster. This ability to provide consistent access is not simple—the process requires a lot of coordination between the various nodes in the cluster.

Although Oracle RAC scales well, there is an upper limit on horizontal scalability. In general, application scalability is based on how good the application works in a single instance. If the SQL statements executed by the application are efficient and use an expected and reasonable amount of resources (usually measured by Logical I/O and/or Physical I/O counts), you can generally expect this to scale well. In other words, you might compare Oracle RAC to a stereo amplifier: If the quality of the recording, whether on an audio tape or a digital device, is bad, placing even the best amplifier in front of it will not solve the problem. Instead, it will amplify the problem and make the situation unpleasant. This is also applicable for Oracle RAC or any other scalability solution. Hence, you will need to make sure application-level tuning is performed to remove bottlenecks before using clustering to scale out.

With the constant downward pressure on improving Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), businesses have chosen to move away from “Big Iron,” monolithic servers to smaller sets of lower-cost “commodity” servers, And this is where Oracle RAC has truly come into its element because it helps businesses realize this paradigm shift by enabling large workloads to run on clusters of lower-cost servers rather than single, monolithic boxes. Also, such servers are able to scale up or down to the workload easily. Many new features in Oracle Database 11g RAC, such as server pools and SCAN provide the ability to perform this scaling seamlessly without interruption to the business.

Along with near-linear scalability, Oracle RAC–based systems can be configured to eliminate SPOF as far as the database layer is concerned. When database servers fail, applications based on Oracle RAC systems simply keep running. When designed and coded properly, this application failover is mostly transparent to users.

When combined with Oracle Data Guard, Oracle RAC is protected from major site failures. Oracle RAC enables horizontal scalability and thus the ability to support large, global, single-instance computing that hosts thousands of users. When protected via various HA options, such single global instances significantly reduce costs via consolidation in terms of servers, datacenters, software licenses, and skilled staff to maintain them.

 

Emerging Trends

Businesses today need to not just scale up but also to scale back—and to perform such scale-ups and scale-downs quickly, in a matter of a few hours or even minutes. This has placed an enormous demand on IT and datacenters to provide infrastructure not in a matter of days or weeks, but in terms of minutes. In other words, IT organizations should be able to commission and decommission computing services on the fly—something that was a pipe dream a few years ago.

IT organizations and vendors are now able to provide this scaling quickly and easily using a combination of first “virtualizing” computing resources and then building the ability to expose these resources in a metered and controlled fashion (namely “cloud computing”). This is achieved first by carving out virtual machines (VMs) from physical servers and presenting them as a service to both internal and external consumers.

IT vendors today are able to virtualize environments using products such as Oracle Virtual Servers (a hypervisor based on open-source Xen technology) to spin up computing resources on demand. Prime examples of the ability of vendors to provide cloud computing includes Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and SalesForce.com’s Sales Cloud 2. The former has quickly become sophisticated to the extent that they are now even able to provision complete Oracle E-Business Suite environments in minutes.

On the backend database side, this means that Oracle technologies should be able to scale database services as well. Oracle RAC plays a key role here because it provides scalability. However, the challenge is to perform this scaling dynamically without any interruption to the availability.

 

Oracle 11g Solutions

Oracle Database 11g RAC takes this challenge head on. The key requirement for dynamic provisioning is that the technology should be able to support resource movement and reassignments easily and dynamically from a pool, along with support for such functionality at all layers and components. We will dive into more detail in later chapters, but briefly, Oracle ASM provides the total abstraction at the storage layer, allowing multiple hosts to see not just database storage but share disk files as well, and dynamically adjust them to changing requirements. Oracle ASM also provides a complete suite of fully functioning Dynamic Volume Manager and File System for Oracle storage needs.

Also, server pools in the Oracle Grid Infrastructure foundation provide the capability of dynamically allocating resources within a Grid of Oracle RAC environment, thus providing flexibility at the database layer. SCAN IP provides a way to access a cluster using a single IP address, thus simplifying naming and administration.

In the latest version (namely Oracle Database 11gR2), Oracle provides the ability to spin up single, non–Oracle RAC instances for smaller loads and yet provide the high availability and “hot failover” to another node using RAC One. Edition-based Redefinition completes the high availability scenario because this feature can be used to provide application transparency during software changes as well—that is, online hot patching, the holy grail of downtime optimizations.

 

In a Nutshell

Modern business requirements have great impact on database and application availability, and vice versa. With ever-growing requirements and extreme dependence on information availability, the information systems are expected to remain fully functional and survive all external failures. The key to designing highly available systems relies on eliminating single-point failures in all critical components.

Oracle technologies are always a leap ahead on the current trends, making sure the enterprise requirements are met. Current versions of Oracle Clustering and Oracle Grid Infrastructure components allow us to increase and shrink the capacity on demand seamlessly. Oracle ASM and ACFS completely virtualized the storage infrastructure for the datacenter and have components built in to support continuous availability and transparent scalability.

Clusters provide an enterprise with uninterrupted access to their business-critical information, enabling the nonstop functions of the business. Clusters can be configured with various failover modes, depending on the requirements of the business. When designed and implemented judiciously, clusters also provide infinite scalability to business applications.

 

Вас заинтересует / Intresting for you:

Oracle Endeca Studio Systems A...
Oracle Endeca Studio Systems A... 1555 views Даниил Fri, 20 Jul 2018, 09:35:41
Oracle NoSQL Database in detai...
Oracle NoSQL Database in detai... 2737 views sepia Thu, 21 Jun 2018, 18:30:58
Endeca IAS and Endeca WAT Comp...
Endeca IAS and Endeca WAT Comp... 1209 views Даниил Thu, 02 Aug 2018, 03:37:24
Oracle Grid Infrastructure Ins...
Oracle Grid Infrastructure Ins... 6911 views Antoni Mon, 06 Jul 2020, 07:02:21
Comments (0)
There are no comments posted here yet
Leave your comments
Posting as Guest
×
Suggested Locations