VPLEX Metro and Oracle RAC – it’s CERTIFIED!

VPLEX Metro for Oracle RAC is now officially Oracle Certified. The final set of accreditation tests has been completed and rubber stamped by Oracle.

http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2012/20120517-04.htm

This means that our customers can be confident that VPLEX Metro can provide an Oracle certified solution that enables CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY of their Oracle RAC environment.

Before VPLEX

Typical Oracle RAC solution is active in only one site with, for example, passive array replication to a remote site.

Areas for possible enhancement

• Requires full failover and restart at remote site
• Recovery time objective (RTO) is long
• Complex DR testing

Oracle RAC with ASM Mirroring

To enable some of the enhancements outlined above, customers are able to deploy Oracle RAC with ASM Mirroring (Host based).

Areas for possible enhancement

• Valuable CPU cycles spent on host mirroring
• Error-prone management of host mirroring, groups, paths
• Complex cross-connect SAN networking

Oracle RAC with VPLEX Metro

Oracle RAC with VPLEX Metro enables Oracle Administrators to deploy highly available, highly performant (I/O can be consumed from both arrays and does not consume host CPU cycles), Oracle database environments that are simple to configure and simple to operate.

Oracle RAC nodes can be physical servers or can be based on Oracle VM or VMware. In environments where nodes are based on virtualised server infrastructure, VPLEX Metro enables even greater levels of availability by enabling running nodes to be migrated between sites.

VPLEX enables an active/active storage environment and Oracle RAC can enable an active/active application platform. But why does any of this matter?  Oracle is often the foundation of key business applications like SAP. By being able to create a continuously available infrastructure and application platform that can remain available even in the event of a site outage, customers can start to build business application environments, like SAP, that can in turn also have near continuous availability.

Did I mention that VPLEX is heterogeneous from a storage perspective? You can have this solution even if you are not using EMC Storage! Go figure.

You can find more information in this VPLEX for Oracle RAC Whitepaper  and of course if you have any questions or comments, post them here!