5 MAA and High Availability Best Practices

Choosing and implementing the architecture that best fits the availability requirements of a business can be a daunting task. This architecture must encompass appropriate redundancy, provide adequate protection from all types of outages, ensure consistent high performance and robust security, while being easy to deploy, manage, and scale. Needless to mention, this architecture should be driven by well-understood business requirements.

To build, implement and maintain such an architecture, a business needs high availability best practices that involve both technical and operational aspects of its IT systems and business processes. Such a set of best practices removes the complexity of designing a high-availability architecture, maximizes availability while using minimum system resources, reduces the implementation and maintenance costs of the high-availability systems in place, and makes it easy to duplicate the high-availability architecture in other areas of the business.

An enterprise with a well-articulated set of high availability best practices that encompass high availability analysis frameworks, business drivers and system capabilities, enjoys an improved operational resilience and enhanced business agility.

Once you have chosen a high-availability architecture as described in Chapter 4, you can implement it using the MAA best practices documentation. The common set of best practices is described in the MAA and high availability white papers located on the MAA OTN Web site and in the Oracle Database High Availability Best Practices documentation:

• MAA and high availability best practices white papers

  Oracle offers various white papers that provide technical details on its various high-availability technologies, along with best practice recommendations on configuring and using such technologies. Oracle high availability white papers can be downloaded from

  http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/maa.htm
  

• Oracle Database High Availability Best Practices

  This book provides detailed best practice recommendations and information. It can help you to configure a new high-availability environment, or migrate an existing configuration to create a redundant, reliable system without sacrificing simplicity and performance.

  The book's step-by-step method of describing the best practices removes the complexity of designing a high-availability architecture, maximizes availability while using minimum system resources, reduces the implementation and maintenance costs of the high-availability systems in place, and makes it easy to duplicate the high-availability architecture in other areas of the business.