【EMC Proven Solutions Introduction】 Oracle Extended RAC with EMC VPLEX Metro - Best Practices Planning

Business case

EMC VPLEX is an enterprise-class storage federation technology that aggregates and manages pools of Fibre Channel (FC) attached storage within and across data centers.  Oracle RAC support the transparent deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers, and Oracle RAC on extended distance clusters provides a way to scale out performance, utilize storage and server resources at multiple sites.  VPLEX Metro working in conjunction with Oracle RAC on extended distance clusters can simplify SAN infrastructure and to reduce some of the storage management complexity associated with an extended RAC deployment model.

Please refer to the white paper in Everything Oracle at EMC for more details:

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-12274

Main benefits of VPLEX Metro in an extended Oracle RAC:

• Continuous database availability through network, server, storage and site failures
• Scale out architecture and full read-write access to the same database at both sites (no idle hardware)
• Simplification of deployment of Oracle RAC over distance:

        a)  Cluster Nodes need only to connect to local VPLEX cluster.  No cross site connection is required.

        b)  Simplified infrastructure requirements with deployments of Oracle voting disk by distributed volumes and VPLEX Witness.

        c)  Reduced consumption of Oracle Cluster node CPU cycles and associated with host based mirroring.  Instead, hardware raid provided by VPLEX  and the underlying physical array provide this function.

        d)  Ability to create consistency groups that protect multiple databases or application files as a unit.

        e)  VPLEX volumes do not require an application downtime or LUN ID changes during storage hardware refresh and migrations.

        f)  Compared to a single site deployment model, the extend Oracle RAC model provides easy Disaster Recovery testing and validation based on the  fact that both sites can actively participate in the workload.