Amazon EC2′s high-profile outage in the US East region has taught us a number of lessons. For many, the take-away has been a realization that cloud-based systems (like conventionally-hosted systems) can fail. Of course, we knew that, Amazon knew that, and serious companies who performed serious availability engineering before deploying to … [Read more...]
WHY AUTOMATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR EVERY SHOP
As physical infrastructure has changed over the years, management and configuration mechanisms have evolved as well. In the old days, large machines were managed by hand in many cases, by expert administrators who understood their configuration intimately. Then, as smaller machines were integrated into the enterprise, management-by-hand became … [Read more...]
New whitepaper: The DBA Disaster Diary – Double Failure
Most organizations running Oracle today are thinking about availability to some degree. For many, it is to their great dismay that they find that average availability is no higher after implementing a high-availability architecture such as RAC or dataguard. Paradoxically, many organizations find that their availability numbers actually get … [Read more...]
New whitepaper: High availability without breaking the bank
Oracle’s RAC-centric marketing sells Oracle short by ignoring a broad spectrum of huge advances in 9i and 10g. These features, including logical standby (part of DataGuard), streams, improved multimaster replication, flashback query, Cross-platform transportable tablespaces, improved RMAN (including the pipe interface), constitute the great … [Read more...]