Oracle Consolidation, Grid, RAC and Clusters

Our mission: low-cost high availability
At DSP, we consider poor system performance to be downtime. That’s why we’ve transformed the ‘art’ of performance-tuning into a science – guaranteeing you an optimised, high availability system to meet your service levels. But not at any price. In fact, we see to it that our clients lower their costs at the same time.

That’s why we recommend database grids that use Oracle RAC. So, instead of managing silos of expensive servers, Oracle grids use a shared server-platform composed of commodity servers and storage – combining scalability, availability and infrastructure agility – to simplify your IT landscape and keep costs to a minimum. What’s more, database consolidation using Oracle grid computing reduces the costs of supporting your IT infrastructure, while allowing you to adapt to change faster.

>> DSP Oracle Technology Fact Sheet

Complementary database technology achieving scalable and controlled growth - Database grids
Database grids use Oracle RAC and commodity servers and storage to simplify your infrastructure and also allow you to adapt to change faster. Instead of managing silos of expensive servers Oracle grids use a shared server platform that combines scalability, availability and infrastructure agility at the lowest cost. Database consolidation using Oracle grid reduces the costs of supporting your IT infrastructure.

DSP have been building Oracle grids since the technology was called Oracle Parallel Server, so we truly understand how to deploy Oracle RAC to leverage all its benefits. We’re also one of only a handful of Oracle partners worldwide that have successfully deployed Oracle stretch RAC in an extended distance configuration – rather than the legacy active-standby configuration. This can provide the ‘holy grail’ of disaster tolerance coupled to full utilisation of all computing resources.

RAC allows seamless growth of the production system environment, enabling a business to dynamically respond to increases in system demand from either the user base or customer communities. This is achieved by allowing extra nodes (additional database servers) to be added quickly, without system loss or downtime.

By spreading the work load across multiple servers, resilience is increased. If one server fails, the load is automatically shared across the remaining server(s). This approach shields the user community from any disruption and once the server has been fixed or replaced; the reconnection has no detrimental effect on the working environment.

Lowering Operational Cost
RAC can also lower the Total Cost of Operation (TCO) by replacing single box servers based upon expensive Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) computing with a larger number of lower specification servers (commodity computing). This also means the single point of failure is removed as any problems with the SMP box would mean the system has to go off line to be rectified, RAC removes this requirement.

There are a wide range of configurations and solutions based upon RAC and depending upon requirements a range of solutions can be constructed. To help select the correct solution DSP offers an initial discussion as a pre-sales activity for any organisation investigating the benefits of RAC.

Please Contact DSP to understand our experience with the complementary database technology - how your IT infrastructure can achieve scalable and controlled growth.