Tag Archives: active active

Oracle RAC on VPLEX now certified

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Last week EMC announced that Oracle RAC on VPLEX stretched clusters is now officially supported and certified by Oracle!

News Summary:

 

  • Oracle has certified that EMC® VPLEX™ METRO in a stretch cluster configuration can provide Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) customers with an easy-to-deploy, active/active solution, as they transform from single- to dual-site environments.
  • Having passed Oracle’s rigorous testing standards, the EMC VPLEX METRO solution can enable Oracle RAC to be easily configured over extended distances while enabling simultaneous access to the same data at both locations.

This is the final step in a process to help customers that have been asking for true active/active support over distance for their mission-critical Oracle Database business processes.

For those who are not yet familiar with this solution, here is a small summary:

  • Customers have been in search for ways to survive datacenter failures (i.e. “disasters”) without the need to recover and restart the databases, in such a way that any component failure or even complete site failure would not lead to database downtime
  • This was not possible before except when deploying complex configurations based on host mirroring using Oracle ASM or a 3rd party volume manager. (note that competing storage virtualization products from other storage vendors also do not offer this full capability – even though their marketing might make it seem so)
  • EMC VPLEX offers this functionality which is now completely certified and supported by Oracle, and the solution avoids risk by making the stretched cluster deployment as easy as a basic Oracle RAC install
  • The VPLEX solution offers additional benefits including better performance, better recovery from issues such as component or link failures and offers a complete solution for the whole application stack, not just Oracle
  • Note that AFAIK this solution should also work for IBM DB2 (but I haven’t confirmed)

The full news release can be found here: http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2012/20120517-04.htm

A full series of blog posts on this solution can be found here: https://bartsjerps.wordpress.com/category/vplex/

The VPLEX witness (the final component of VPLEX that made this possible) was announced last year at EMC World 2011. Typically we see the start of market adoption between 1 to 1.5 years after bringing new technology in the market. I am working on a few customers myself who are on the edge of starting a project with this, hopefully by the end of year we have a set of good customer references!

Update: The new white paper can be found here: http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8930-vplex-metro-oracle-rac-wp.pdf

Update 2: VPLEX support mentioned (briefly) on Oracle’s website: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/tech-generic-linux-new-086754.html

Update 3: Demos available on EMC Demo Center:

EMC VPLEX Metro for Oracle RAC Solution Overview
Oracle RAC with VPLEX Metro Site Failure
Oracle RAC with VPLEX Metro Solution Overview
Oracle RAC with VPLEX Storage Failure

If you’re a frequent reader of my blog you might recognize familiar pictures there ;)

Oracle Stretched Cluster with VPLEX (update)

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One request I got back after my series on Oracle RAC stretched clusters is if I could summarize again why anybody would choose VPLEX for storage replication over other solutions. My attempt was to describe the principles of VPLEX in enough detail for techies to understand it. For non-geeks, I will try to explain it as brief as possible.
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Eliminate Hot Backup with EMC consistency technology

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For many years, EMC customers have been using storage replication technology to create copies of entire databases. Using storage cloning has many advantages over other mechanisms (file copy, tape restore, and the like). Most significant is that EMC storage can create near-instant copies of large applications without significant performance overhead. The reason is that the storage system is using its huge internal bandwidth and a couple of smart tricks to create the copy, therefore bypassing the host I/O layer.

Cloning

Cloning

In other words, a server running a database does not have to move a single bit of data for creating a copy of a multi-terabyte database.

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Stretched Clusters – Alien storage

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In my previous posts I described how Oracle ASM can be used to build stretched clusters. I also pointed to some limitations of that scenario. But I am by far not the first one in doing so – and some of EMC’s competitors attempted to build products, features and solutions to overcome some of the limitations in host mirroring.

A while ago, some guys I met from an EMC partner, confronted me with the question why EMC, the market leader in external storage and premium Oracle technology partner, had not offered a solution for these limitations. They pointed to a number of products from competitors that – allegedly – solved the problem already. Also they pointed to the architectural simplicity of these solutions.

Alien Storage

At that time I had no good answer (which does not happen to me very often). I was not aware of how these products worked and I asked some questions on that. In that period I was also confronted by our enterprise customers who started demanding an EMC solution for stretched clustering – so I started digging. Could it be that EMC was over-passed by some of these alien storage start-up companies in continuous available storage solutions? It seemed to be the case.
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