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High Availability for Databases
Exceed your database SLAs with HA solutions. High availability (HA) refers to the continuous operation of a system for higher-than-normal periods of time. While availability is objectively measured as a percentage of uptime, it’s also subjectively determined from the point of view of users – if they can’t access the system, it’s not available.
Today’s businesses typically strive for an environment that’s running 99.999% of the time. This is “five nines” availability and represents the service level agreement (SLA) to the organization.
But HA isn’t just about whether the system is up or down – it’s also about whether it’s performing well enough to be useful. After all, from a user’s perspective a system that’s running slowly is almost as bad as one that isn’t running at all.
Who’s responsible for high availability?
As a member of your organization’s technology team, you understand the challenges of keeping things running continuously and smoothly. But, not all aspects of maintaining high availability will be under your immediate control. Complex environments consist of storage, server clusters, load balancers, memory and more. Each requires tuning and optimization to run at peak performance under daily and peak loads. Your network professionals and system architects are largely responsible for ensuring your infrastructure is designed for HA.
But, as a DBA, your organization depends on you to maintain high database availability. You can’t afford unscheduled downtime that could result in loss of service, loss of data, loss of money and loss of customers. You need any edge that will help you meet or exceed your SLAs and your role is made more complicated by the presence of multiple databases and platforms, each of which has its own set of demands.
How can SharePlex help?
Conquer downtime. With SharePlex, you can eliminate the downtime normally associated with migrations and upgrades by replicating your production data to a separate server. You can keep business and transactions humming in the secondary environment while you perform the installation, testing and verification on the main instance.
Enable rapid failover. HA relies on databases that can immediately take over for each other if one has failed. Replication and synchronization with SharePlex, along with automatic failover, ensure that redundant databases are always standing by and ready at a moment’s notice with the most current data.
Combine with disaster recovery goals. The asynchronous replication model used by SharePlex can also help you meet your disaster recovery objectives. With replication and reconciliation, your critical, real-time applications don’t have to wait for an entire disaster recovery database copy to be spun up, and you won’t lose transactions. If you’re already using SharePlex for a high availability solution, you could use the same target database for disaster recovery, and avoid the extra complexities and costs of separate solutions.
Support analytics and reporting. You can also use SharePlex to offload reporting from your production system to your destination system to ensure high availability and accelerate reporting. SharePlex makes it easy to maximize the value of your data without sacrificing database performance.