Bruce,
great reply! great points to ponder!
Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional
-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 7:41 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Ron,
I'm going to say that it might be possible with some provisions.
eg - what does 24*7 actually mean in your context:
I believe 99% uptime gives 87 hours down per year
whilst 99.9999% uptime gives half a minute downtime per year.
Which end of the spectrum are you after?
I have an NT Oracle server that has been up for 271 days without any
reboots.
So is it possible - yes, is it normal - probably not.
As Tom said, don't install new software regularly (ie not at all unless its
critical).
Have a separate test machine and probably a separate development machine -
ideally exactly same hardware.
Obviously for a single machine you will have hardware RAID.
But disk controllers might be a point of redundancy so have dual controllers
with automatic failover of RAID sets between the controllers.
Have hot swappable components - get written guarantees from the hardware
supplier AND the hardware maintenance suppliers that everything is hot
swappable AND that they will make use of the hot swappability when they
replace failed components (yes we've been caught out here).
But, this probably will still leave you (at least in the NT world) with CPU,
memory and motherboard that can not be replaced unless you take the server
down.
So perhaps you need a second machine.
What type of failover do you want / need to this machine - this will depend
upon your real uptime requirements - how much does a minute of downtime
really cost?
You will want remote management software that works via dial-in (eg PC
Anywhere, VNC or ???) and I would recommend some sort of hardware remote
control as well that works without NT and allows remote power up / power
down (eg DELL DRAC card).
Maybe you want OPS - but still shared disks and in the same room if you use
standard NT clustering.
Maybe just clustering plus Oracle failsafe?
Maybe you need an NT clustering environment that has replicated disks at a
remote data site.
Maybe a remote standby server will meet your requirements.
Maybe all you need is an identical server that you can manually swap the
drives with and you have a "luke-warm" redundant server.
Are you going to use a "normal" variant of NT (eg NT4 Server, 2000 Advanced
Server) or are you going to look into Datacentre server?
Have a look at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/business/overview/rel
iable/default.asp.
Don't forget other points that are applicable regardless of the server OS -
eg can your application provide 24*7, how will you do application upgrades,
how will you do Oracle upgrades, do you need dual network cards, maybe even
dual network hubs - all this relates back to how much does downtime really
cost you?
I hope this helps and will be interested to hear your final decision.
And if you're interested - we have a NT forms application that runs 24 * 7
on NT (as in it is used interactively by operators 24 hours a day, every day
of the year), but our application uptime requirement is probably something
like 99.8%, we don't have a cluster, but we do have an identical server that
can run the application, and we are currently running NT4. We have to shut
the application down to do application upgrades and they occur every few
weeks.
Regards,
Bruce Reardon
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2001 6:36
Ron,
my experience has been that "it all depends".
If your NT server is being administered by a sane, conservative SA, who does
not treat it like a desktop machine ("hey, lets downloaded the latest free
Java tool"), then it "might" suffice.
It also depends on the load you will be asking it to support. Generally, I
have found that the machines run reasonably well if people would set them up
correctly and then leave them alone.
Hope this helps.
Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 4:07 PM
I have a treasury application that needs to be up 24 x 7 except for
scheduled downtime. Is there any way to guarantee an app will be available
24 x 7 on NT? Is anyone faced with this?
Ron Smith
Database Administration
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