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More Than 9,000 Users Get Reliable, Round-the-Clock Human Resources Services with Oracle RAC
Availability and reliability is why TALX, a provider of human resources, payroll, and employment verification services based in St. Louis, Missouri, upgraded its infrastructure for running Web-based applications that provide self-service capabilities to more than 9,000 clients. TALX had been using Oracle 10g Release 1 hosted on a three-node cluster running 32-bit Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Cluster Services.
"If one node failed, one of the surviving nodes did double duty. Also this was a 32-bit implementation, and we were starting to break into the limits of 32 bits from a memory perspective," says Bryan Garcia, vice president of technology at TALX.
The upgrade expanded the architecture to a six-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) running Oracle 10g Release 2 and the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition x64. TALX also installed Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to manage and monitor the Oracle RAC environment. Now, the company always has the memory resources it needs, which keeps server utilizations at optimum levels, and Oracle RAC assures high availability.
"We like the idea that if a component fails, we can degrade gracefully, versus a big-iron environment, where if that server dies, we're out of luck unless we happen to have another piece of big iron sitting there just collecting dust," Garcia says.
TALX has also been able to enhance its operations due to Oracle RAC, including the ability to perform OS-level patches without incurring any outages on a rolling basis by shifting workload between Oracle RAC nodes. TALX also now has the ability to move Oracle capacity (Oracle RAC nodes) between workloads as capacity demand dictates.
Garcia reports that his operations no longer see the significant performance degradations that occurred if a single node failed in the prior clustering environment and that Oracle RAC has contributed to uptime levels for the past five months of 99.8 percent, which is well above service-level agreements.
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