Oracle Maximum
Availability Architecture - Overview
The Maximum Availability
Architecture (MAA) provides superior data protection and availability
by minimizing or eliminating planned and unplanned downtime at all
technology stack layers including hardware or software components. Data
protection and high availability are achieved regardless of the scope
of a failure event - whether from hardware failures that cause data
corruptions, or from catastrophic acts of nature that impact a broad
geographic area.
MAA also eliminates guesswork and uncertainty when implementing a high
availability architecture utilizing the full complement of Oracle HA
technologies. MAA Best Practices are described in a series of technical
white papers and documentation to assist in designing, implementing,
and managing an optimum high availability architecture.
For example,
the following diagram represents an HA architecture involving the
Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server.
Example of an
HA
Configuration using MAA Best Practices
This
architecture involves identically configured primary and secondary
sites. The primary site contains multiple application servers and a
production database using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to
protect from host and instance failures. The secondary site also
contains similarly configured application servers, and a physical
standby database kept synchronized with the primary database by Oracle
Data Guard. Clients are initially routed to the primary site.
If
a
severe outage affects the primary site, Data Guard quickly fails over
the
production database role to the standby database, after which
clients are directed to the new primary database to resume processing. The Active
Data Guard Option with Real-Time Query (Oracle Database 11g) enables
the physical standby database to
be open-read only while apply is active; enhancing primary database
performance by offloading overhead from ad-hoc queries and reporting to
the synchronized standby database at the secondary site. Data
Guard 11g Snapshot Standby also makes standby databases an ideal QA
system, without compromising data protection. Thus all computing
resources are actively utilized, even those that are in a "standby"
role - providing maximum return-on-investment along with data
protection and availability.
The
architecture presented above is only one example of an MAA
implementation. The rich set of Oracle High Availability features
provide customers with the flexibility to implement an MAA architecture
optimized for specific business requirements.
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