E-Business - always available (page 8 of 8)

"Then you might decide that the next step is to protect your primary database from a host failure, so you implement Oracle RAC. You just continue to add your levels of data protection into your high-availability architecture."

The Grid Moves High Availability to New Level
Until recently, high availability has been measured in figures under 100 percent. It simply hasn't been possible to consider a system that never goes down and isn't susceptible to some failure, no matter how remote, so a highly available system might be guaranteed to be available 99.99 percent of the time. New grid technologies, however, may just offer the
promise of even more uptime.

"Grid computing takes the issue of high availability to a different level," says Piro. "Grid is making people realize that performance, availability, and capacity are all wrapped together and have to be there 100 percent of the time. Customers expect them to work together. Grid takes all these requirements and puts them together in one uniform concept."

With Oracle9i, Oracle began offering grid technologies—features such as Transportable Tablespaces and Oracle Streams—that dynamically provision pooled resources and data to the users and programs that need them. With Oracle Database 10g, all Oracle core technologies are now enabled for use in an enterprise grid environment, providing even higher availability.

Oracle Database 10g enables a new model for high availability by combining high-volume, inexpensive processors and inexpensive storage to produce a high-quality system. New capabilities such as disk-based recovery, Flashback, and rolling upgrades now make it possible for Oracle users to build highly available IT infrastructures with low-cost, high-volume components. Says Oracle's Loaiza, "There's a new economics that organizations should be aware of: trading inexpensive disk space for expensive downtime. With Oracle Database 10g, we're enabling organizations to spend less money on hardware but still achieve resilient, high-availability deployments."

Oracle Database 10g also helps organizations increase availability by providing ways to compensate for human error (such as a DBA deleting or restoring the wrong files). "When you're talking about availability and recovery from every angle, it's not just system errors that are important; it's data availability as well," says Summersky's Vallath. "In Oracle Database 10g you have the Flashback option, dynamic redefinition and reconfiguration options, enhanced backup and recovery options, and more.

All these great features give you an extra advantage for achieving maximum availability."
Across the board, Oracle Database 10g's support for high availability now provides organizations with a new opportunity to reevaluate their organization's high-availability strategy and move toward one that utilizes low-cost, standard hardware and storage. By integrating availability into the fabric of the computing infrastructure the way grid computing does, organizations will have even more flexibility to use their IT resources in ways that make the most business sense.