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SERVICE CONTINUITY

The top IT priorities for most business above all others are protecting data and maintaining good quality continuous service. Specific requirements will vary but the basic principles apply universally. We have years of experience protecting companies systems from data loss and service failure, having designed and implemented the most critical aspects of 24x7 systems for major blue chip firms.

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If you would like a review of your current service continuity protection or are interested in implementing some of the approaches outlined below please contact us to discuss your requirements.

HIGH AVAILABILITY

High availability configurations implement redundancy to allow a service to continue operating during maintenance or after a component failure. A full system view must be taken where high availability is concerned as all components must survive failure for the system to continue operating. A design must consider specialised components and complex configurations and to be effective all aspects of the HA system must tie together seamlessly and be verified. We have implemented many HA configurations, the technology outlined below are some examples of the solutions we can provide.

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  • Load balancing (F5 BigIP, Oracle Traffic Director)

  • Database clustering (Oracle RAC, MySQL cluster)

  • Application server clustering (WebLogic, JBoss Enterprise)

  • VM infrastructure clustering (Oracle VM, VMWare)

  • Caching (Coherence, JBoss Data Grid)

  • LDAP replication (OUD, OID, LDAP sync, Active Directory)

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DISASTER RECOVERY

In the event of a catastrophic event at a primary site such as loss of a storage unit, a fire, a flood or persistent power failure, system data must be recovered and service restored. It is critical for all businesses to have a copy of their data at a secondary location. All our customer work involves making provision for multi-site operation and documenting and verifying the approach. There are a variety of ways these solutions can be implemented and it depends on the technology, service requirements and budget. We will always strive to provide the best data protection we can with the tools available. Some of the data replication and disaster recovery technologies we have used and advocate are listed below.

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  • Oracle Data Guard

  • Oracle Golden Gate

  • MySQL replication

  • NetApp SnapMirroring

  • ZFS replication

  • LDAP replication

  • VM replication

  • Passive hosts

  • rsync

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PERFORMANCE AND QUALITY OF SERVICE

If capacity is reduced or key business procedures are delayed due to poor performance or poor service this can have a financial impact and damage reputation. Performance problems can be difficult to resolve and responsibility can bounce between different support teams. Operational staff are under pressure to perform routine duties and may not have time to pinpoint problems or inspect the wider system. To solve a problem the whole system must be analysed objectively and the area of investigation refined until a problematic component can be identified and analysed in detail. This is a selection of the tools and approaches we use for identifying system and application performance problems.

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  • Browser instrumentation

  • Network inspection

  • Code instrumentation

  • Java analysis tools

  • Memory leak detection

  • Load testing tools

  • Operating system utilities

  • Log inspection

  • Oracle Real Application Testing

  • Oracle Enterprise Manager

  • Oracle ADDM and AWR

  • Database trace analysis

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