This book explains how to architect and deploy high availability (HA) solutions with Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) in a Sun[tm] Cluster 3.x environment. It presents information to help you decide when an Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software solution is appropriate to satisfy the availability requirements of your business. In addition, this book explains the technology behind these products, describes successful customer deployments, and provides technical tips and preferred practice recommendations.

This book features detailed case studies, including:

A large German bank that has implemented an Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software solution to meet the ever-increasing business demands of the banking industry.

• One of the largest companies in Europe for alpine skiing that has implemented Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software to support HA requirements in a consolidated environment.
  
• A benchmark case that describes the use of Oracle RAC with Sun's Remote Shared Memory (RSM) technology to improve the performance of single-instance databases.
  
• A large financial institution that uses Sun Cluster's HA Oracle agent to provide the necessary level of HA required for their database.
  

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kristien Hens is currently working as a Technology System Engineer, focusing on storage and cluster technologies. Before that she worked for four years for Sun Educational Services. She has taught storage and Sun Cluster courses to customers and Sun engineers. She has also developed and taught the courses Oracle 9i for Sun Engineers and Oracle 9i RAC on Sun Cluster 3.x Workshop. She is coauthor of three Sun BluePrints OnLine articles.

Michael Loebmann has been the local senior systems engineer for the ISV Oracle in Germany for three years. His tasks include both the exchange of technical knowledge between Oracle and Sun and customer consultation with regard to competition. He has been working in the computer field since 1990, and for Oracle since 1993. He has more than nine years of experience with Oracle products, especially in Oracle data warehousing and parallel Oracle databases (OPS and RAC). His specialties include Oracle performance tuning on Solaris and the investigation of database performance on storage subsystems. Creating Highly Available Database Solutions Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Sun" Cluster 3.x software.