// Bringing Continuous Availability to Oracle Environments

Many organizations today face a significant challenge that is negatively impacting their operational efficiency, revenue potential and ability to provide a trusted IT environment: the prevalence of mission-critical application downtime. To combat this problem, infrastructure owners and DBAs have introduced strategies to increase resiliency—however—both unplanned and planned downtime are still pervasive despite these efforts. As a result, this study discovered that 46% of survey respondents are less than satisfied with their current availability strategy for their mission-critical Oracle-based applications.

Key highlights and findings from the survey, which explore database availability and resiliency challenges and solutions, include the following:

• Service-level agreements (SLAs) are getting more demanding —and application owners are struggling to meet them. Data resources need to be available to end-users in a matter of minutes, regardless of disruption. Close to one-fourth of organizations in the survey, 24%, have SLAs of “four nines”of availability or greater, meaning they require less than 52 minutes of downtime per year. However, just as many respondents state that they are only meeting their SLAs sometimes, not frequently enough, or not at all.
• Unplanned and planned downtime is pervasive. More than 25% of respondents experienced more than eight hours of unplanned downtime in the past year, and 50% percent of respondents scheduled more than eight hours of planned downtime. These two points contribute to low levels of satisfaction from IT directors and database owners.
• Respondents lack the right tools and technologies to meet the most demanding SLAs. At this time only one-third of companies have the potential to support near-instantaneous replication.
• Many businesses maintain multiple data centers and replicate between sites. However, these strategies may be falling short. Among respondents with at least two data centers and rapid replication solutions, 46% indicate they are less than satisfied with their current strategies. For sites with three or more data centers, this figure drops to 35%.

BRINGING CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY TO ORACLE ENVIRONMENTS—2013 IOUG Mission-Critical Application Availability Survey was produced by Unisphere Research in partnership with the Independent Oracle Users Group and sponsored by EMC Corporation.