RE: High Availability -- True 7x24x365

  • From: "Murching, Bob" <bob_murching@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "'regdba@xxxxxxxxx'" <regdba@xxxxxxxxx>, "'Oracle-l'" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 13:42:02 -0400

As an aside, I have to question whether overzealous patching and upgrading
policies contribute to the problem.   If I put on my DBA hat, I'd be the
first to want to fire up 10g R2 and check out all the cool gadgets that it
comes with, and I'd want to be like the Dr. DBAs on OTN and evangelize the
benefits of the new toys to the DBAs, sysadmins and developers.  But when I
put on my manager hat, I can't help but notice that often we upgrade for the
sake of upgrading, or we embrace new gadgets knowing that they are more
likely to require TARs and one-off patches.  The systems with the greatest
uptime often are the ones running Oracle 8.0.5.2.1 and hosting an
application that uses the back-end database for nothing but simple DML.  No
bugs to lose sleep over, no quarterly patchsets to deploy... Just a simple
OS install, a "basic" database configuration, reasonably redundant hardware,
an application with a data model that isn't needlessly complex, and a nice
firewall in front of it all.  Like my refridgerator--keeps chugging along
for years.

I personally have a tough time swallowing this bitter pill (after just
asking our DBAs to get us to 10.1.0.4 and prepare for RAC!) but maybe
sometimes we ourselves are responsible for the threat of downtime.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Barnett [mailto:regdba@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 11:01 AM
To: Oracle-l
Subject: RE: High Availability -- True 7x24x365

Acutally, we are at more than 96% up time.  It is that final 4% that is
driving management crazy!

Since RAC requires a reboot sooner, or later, for upgrades, pateches, etc.
it does not completely meet the requirements unless we do some sort of
distributed thing with two mirrored RAC environments.

This has been suggested and no one flinched at the proposed cost.  Go
figure.

 
--- "Goulet, Dick" <DGoulet@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Pete,
> 
>       We're close to your wants, mainly by accident.  We purchased
reliable 
> servers (HP 9000) and good disk subsystems (EMC Symmetric), a good 
> battery backup UPS with a fast start generator.
>  With that we've
> got 90% uptime with no unscheduled down time. 
> Scheduled downtime is
> still a need.  We're looking into RAC with 10g to give us the 
> remaining 10% but I'm skeptical.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter Barnett
> Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 9:35 AM
> To: Oracle-l
> Subject: High Availability -- True 7x24x365
> 
> We have finally moved into the modern digital world.
> 
> Outages of our company web site are being noticed by our customers 
> which is causing management to ask about maintaining 7x24x365 up time.
> 
> There are several ideas being circulated but I was wondering how 
> others are doing it?
> 
> The requirement is true 7x24x365.  Patches, upgrades, maintenance need 
> to be transparent to the users of our web sites.
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
> Pete Barnett
> Lead Database Administrator
> The Regence Group
> pnbarne@xxxxxxxxxxx
> 
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Pete Barnett
Lead Database Administrator
The Regence Group
pnbarne@xxxxxxxxxxx


                
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