Oracle Real Application Clusters - A great solution from Oracle to gain optimal scalable solution with high availability.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Being an Oracle consultant, I have come across many times where customers seek solutions to problems where they face issues with scalability or load balancing or performance issues on their application. Oracle Real Application Clusters also helps with failover solutions with almost no outage to the business. This allows customers to run a single Oracle Database across multiple servers in order to maximize availability and enable horizontal scalability.
Pros
- Horizontal scalability
- Seamless failover
- No impact on business during failover
Cons
- Oracle Real Application Clusters is totally dependant on DBA's . It would be great if it can be simplified somehow
- Its license cost
- Enabling usage in standard edition
Most Important Features
- Horizontal scalability which enables addition of extra nodes
- Failover
- Application traffic load balance
Return on Investment
- Outage on application downtime has greatly reduced
- Customers confirmed, performance wise, it has been better after deployment of Oracle Real Application Clusters
- Shared storage
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft SQL Server
Other Software Used
Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Application Express, Oracle Database