Monday
Apr192010
The cost of High Availability (HA) with Oracle
Monday, April 19, 2010 at 5:25AM What's the cost of downtime to your business? $100,000 per hour, $1,000,000 or more? The recent Volcanic ash that has grounded European flights is estimated to be costing the airlines $200M a day. In the IT world, High Availability (HA) architectures allow for disaster recovery as well as uninterrupted business continuity during system failure.
This post focuses on a customer’s backend, comprised of a business application stack supported by a dozen Oracle databases. They wish to equip this infrastructure with HA features and ensure that outages do not cost business. How do we address the challenge of pricing the complete solution, with hardware, software, services and annual support?
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Reader Comments (1)
One of the main fallacies in many of the disaster recovery solution that exist today is that they where designed to try and prevent failure from happening and rely heavily on the database to solve thier problems.
One of the main lessons that we can take from the likes of Amazon and Google is that the right way to ensure continuous high availability is by designing our system to cope with failure. We need to assume that what we tend to think of as unthinkable will probably happen, as that’s the nature of failure. So rather than trying to prevent failures, we need to build a system that will tolerate them.
As we can learn from a recent outage event in one of Amazon's cloud data centers, we can’t rely on the data center alone to solve this type of failure. The knowledge of how to manage failure must be built into our application:
I've written a detailed post describing how a top wall street firm designed thiere system to cope with such a disaster scenario here: Elasticity for the Enterprise -- Ensuring Continuous High Availability in a Disaster Failure Scenario