HP and Oracle open the door to affordable availability and scalability
Storage requirements are increasing at a very fast pace. Businesses face a real challenge today in meeting database uptime and reliability requirements while planning for affordable capacity increases. With space running out quickly, many companies are looking for technology that accommodates rapid growth in a cost-effective manner.
Many businesses find an answer in clustering, grid computing or both. For years, HP and Oracle have been partnering to find better ways to provide grid and clustering capabilities. As a result, solutions such as the Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC), in combination with HP high-density servers, are finding their way into more and more businesses.
An overview of clusters
RAC allows you to collect and store huge amounts of data across several servers — a cluster. It also gives you the ability to segregate mission critical processes from CPU-intensive analysis. This, in turn, ensures optimal resource allocation, prioritization and availability.
RAC is highly scalable. For example, if you have a quad CPU system in place, your only upgrade path is to purchase a larger, very expensive, monolithic system. With RAC, you have dual CPU systems, so it's easy and relatively affordable to add another server. You don't have to replace the system; you can just add to the cluster.
An overview of grid computing
Simplified grid computing was a key objective throughout the partnership between HP and Oracle. The idea is to pull together IT resources, linking modular components, such as servers and storage systems, into one large virtual computer that can be managed with one software product.
Large businesses traditionally implement silos of systems, but with an Oracle Grid Computing infrastructure, you can connect all those systems together and manage all IT resources more effectively.
There are numerous advantages to grid computing through Oracle 10g RAC. You get a single system to manage, a true active/active cluster to eliminate downtime and improve performance, and an architecture that can scale horizontally or vertically. At the same time, you get "self aware" technology — just add another server node to the cluster as needs require. It is truly "plug and play" technology.
Grid computing also streamlines management tasks. Often, you have files that get hit over and over at the same sector in the disk. This creates a "hot spot." To eliminate a hot spot, data has to be physically removed and placed elsewhere. But HP has eliminated a lot of that management responsibility with dynamic load balancing. Dynamic load balancing helps lower the amount of time an administrator would normally spend managing the storage environment.
Another benefit of grid computing is lower overall cost of computing. Data centers traditionally implemented silos of systems. They had different levels of spare capacity at different times of the year. In this arrangement, it was difficult to share that excess capacity with other systems that may need it. With a grid-computing infrastructure, you've got a much better opportunity to share available resources across the needs of different applications and groups of users when you most need it.
Reduced entry costs
The partnership of HP and Oracle has reduced the entry costs for many businesses. The HP Parallel Database Cluster (PDC) for Oracle lets you start small with a couple of servers clustered together for high availability. When demand grows and you need to expand, you can add an additional server to the cluster to meet these requirements. Your upfront costs are low and your incremental costs are low, and you can continue to add servers as needed.
The HP PDC for Linux is a multi-node, shared-storage cluster architecture specifically designed, tested and optimized for Oracle 10g RAC databases with optional Oracle Application Server 10g in the middle tier. The HP PDC architecture provides for online cluster expansion of processing and storage capacity. Oracle 10g enables scale-out, multi-node clustering based on concurrent access to shared storage.
This environment is highly available since there are at least two servers in the configuration. If one server goes down, RAC seamlessly transfers the load from the down server to the other server. And as you add more servers, you get the benefit of additional performance and availability. You also have investment protection since you don't have to design your initial configuration for peak capacity, which could leave a lot of computing power unutilized.
Traditionally, the only other alternative for companies that need a secure and highly available system is a large symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) configuration. With this type of configuration, you typically wouldn't use more than 10 to 20 percent of system capacity initially. But with the HP PDC for Oracle 10g RAC, you'll have much higher system utilization. This lowers initial IT costs and allows for controlled growth.
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Don't miss the Oracle Real Application Clusters Webcast with CDW and HP
Tired of system failures and scalability issues? Find out how CDW, Oracle and HP can help you avoid these IT nightmares with Oracle RAC.
This Webcast will introduce you to the Oracle RAC 10g database technology that provides cost-effective business continuity, seamless scalability and flexibility — with your current applications, on your current infrastructure.
Wed., Feb. 7, 2007
11:00 a.m. - Noon PST
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. CST
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. EST
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