This Maximum Availability Architecture Overview describes
how MAA is used to maximize systems availability and meet the most
aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for system availability,
quality of service, and data protection.
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.
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.