The Growing Importance of High Availability

The last ten years have seen an exponential increase in the amount of data generated by large and medium sized organizations. More and more companies have turned to the Internet or private networks to sell their products and interact with their customers; electronic sales and supply chain management have resulted in significant cost savings and new market opportunities. More companies have installed extensive ERP and data warehousing programs, and are relying on their data warehouses for decision support. Faster processors and increased server and PC data processing capacity has enabled more and more companies to rely on client/server applications that back-end to Oracle to run mission critical business applications. All of these factors have contributed to the growth and importance of data and effective data management.

As the world becomes more reliant on data and relational database systems for commerce and enterprise management, database availability and performance have become critical issues for almost every company. Downtime translates into lost revenue and lost customer confidence, in addition to higher costs for the enterprise itself.

This dependence on data and applications has led to an increasing focus on data distribution. The two most common purposes for data distribution are High Availability, or Data Sharing and disaster recovery. High Availability (HA) is the concept that a mission-critical application will remain available and functioning satisfactorily at all hours, during peak use and even during catastrophic failure. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a concept that is usually associated with a plan of action for a company to failover to a new processing site, should the primary site fail due to an unforeseen event.

HA and DR are critical for electronic commerce and supply chain initiatives, ERP and Data Warehousing systems and for client/server applications. To meet the growth in e-commerce, many companies have moved to multi-site transaction processing relying on relational database technology. E-business creates the need for database replication even more than typical database development, since the need for 24X7 availability of e-business sites is critical. Companies running ERP and Data Warehousing systems have distributed data to ensure greater availability and to improve contingency options. Client/server operational relational database applications need backup and recovery mechanisms in place to prevent loss of mission critical data. They also need database replication, especially if these systems are used in different geographical locations.

The cost/benefit of these types of HA/DR solutions are becoming easy to measure, as lost e-business associated with this downtime can more easily be identified as a percentage of daily business activity. For example, a customer who is no longer bound to a potential supplier by geography can more easily switch to another supplier when systems are down. The damage done to a company's reputation, not to mention loss of business, can be avoided if they invest up-front in robust DR solutions. High Availability and Disaster Recovery are no longer looked upon as "optional" technology investments - they are necessary to remain competitive and to prevent lost business.

The Challenges Facing Database Professionals

Database professionals are under increasing pressure from many different directions. They need to insure immediate availability of mission critical data all while protecting against the lost data or unplanned outages that can cost companies hundreds of thousands or sometimes even millions of dollars in lost revenue. At the same time, there has been an emphasis on cost cutting - improving hardware utilization, cutting new development initiatives, and reducing staff. Database professionals are under constant pressure to do more with less, improving performance, reliability and access to data while at the same time minimizing hardware and software investments.

Ixion - The DBA's Ally

At Ixion, we understand these challenges. Our industry-leading High Availability and Disaster Recovery products were designed by database professionals with real-world experience. Ixion's solutions can help you maximize utilization, decrease new-hardware spending, and lower your ongoing database administration costs. Ixion's IxPropagator is the fastest Oracle database replication solution in the world, with by far the easiest installation and configuration and the lowest total cost of ownership. Our other tools can help you better manage unloading and reloading data, optimize your SQL performance, and significantly increase your system's ability to process commands. Ixion can help you meet the challenges you face in operating your Oracle database environment.

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