The Foundation for Database-as-a-Service (White Paper)

High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation

The Foundation for Database-as-a-Service

Oracle White Paper

Executive Overview

Enterprises are under intense pressure to do more with less, to reduce risk and increase agility. The aggressive consolidation of information technology (IT) infrastructure and deployment of Database as a Service (DBaaS) on public or private clouds is a strategy that many enterprises are pursuing to accomplish these objectives.

Several key elements are needed to realize the full potential for cost reduction through database consolidation and DBaaS. High consolidation density and management simplicity are required to achieve maximum reduction in hardware and administrative costs. These attributes must then be combined with intelligent software infrastructure capable of achieving service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, performance, and data protection.

Oracle Multitenant with Oracle Database 12c represents a fundamental re-architecting of the Oracle Database to make it the best platform for database consolidation. Oracle Multitenant is evolutionary, making it simple to consolidate existing Oracle databases to reduce cost. Oracle Multitenant is also revolutionary, enabling maximum consolidation density and dramatically simplifying the management of consolidated database environments compared to previous consolidation strategies.

Oracle Multitenant with Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) provides high availability and data protection for consolidated database environments where the impact of any outage would otherwise be magnified many times over. While Oracle Multitenant and MAA provide unique benefit regardless of the underlying hardware platform or operating system environment, they provide maximum benefit when deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems. Oracle integrated hardware and software solutions reduce total life cycle costs by using standard, high performance platforms that achieve economies of scale for consolidated environments along multiple dimensions: performance, reliability, manageability, and support. Oracle Exadata Database Machine, for example, has demonstrated up to 5x advantage in consolidation density compared to traditional systems.

This paper provides MAA best practices for Database Consolidation using Oracle Multitenant. It describes standard HA architectures that are the foundation for DBaaS. It is most appropriate for a technical audience: Architects, Directors of IT and Database Administrators responsible for the consolidation and migration of traditional database deployments to DBaaS. Recommended best practices are equally relevant to any platform supported by Oracle Database except where explicitly noted as being an optimization or an example that applies only to Oracle Engineered systems.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/availability/maa-consolidation-2186395.pdf