Symantec High Availability Solution for Oracle e-Business Suite

[Mike_Reynolds_P]

Introduction
Oracle e-Business Suite (EB-Suite or EBS or OEBS) is the most comprehensive suite of integrated, global business applications that provides integrated business intelligence portfolio, global business platform, and customer-focused applications strategy.

Currently, many organizations rely on OEBS for their business infrastructure to run without any disruptions. A disruption in the infrastructure translates directly into bottom-line business losses. As an organization’s information systems become increasingly integrated and interdependent, the potential impact of failures and outages grows to enormous proportions. The challenge for IT organizations is to maintain continuous OEBS availability in a complex, interconnected, and heterogeneous application environment. Additionally, there are significant difficulties in maintenance such as:

• Potential points of failure or disruption
• Interdependencies between components which complicate administration
• Constant changes in the infrastructure

Symantec offers an integrated solution to make OEBS highly available. This paper describes Symantec’s high availability (HA) solution for OEBS.

About Oracle e-Business Suite
OEBS is a collection of computer applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply-Chain Management (SCM) developed by Oracle. The software utilizes Oracle's core Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) technology. The e-Business Suite contains several product lines. Each product line comprises of several modules. The product lines are as follows:

• Oracle Customer Relationship Management
• Oracle Financials
• Oracle Human Resource Management System
• Oracle Logistics
• Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Applications
• Oracle Order Management
• Oracle Project Portfolio Management
• Oracle Quotes
• Oracle Transportation Management
• Oracle Warehouse Management Systems
• Oracle Inventory
• Oracle Order Management
• Oracle Receivables
• Oracle General Ledger
• Oracle Cost Management

These product lines incorporate significant technologies which include Oracle database technologies (engines for RDBMS, PL/SQL, Java, HTML, and XML) and technology stacks (Oracle Forms Server, Oracle Reports Server, Apache Web Server, Oracle Discoverer, Jinitiator, and Sun's Java).

Symantec’s solution for ensuring OEBS availability
Symantec offers an end-to-end fully integrated solution for ensuring high availability of OEBS. The solution simplifies the administration of the complex environment with a single interface and reduces planned and unplanned downtime. Symantec’s high availability solution for OEBS combines Symantec’s industry-leading hardware independent software for storage management and availability with a deep understanding of the OEBS and its essential components. The result is an out-of-the-box solution which you can quickly deploy to immediately protect critical OEBS from either planned or unplanned downtime.

The Symantec high availability solution for OEBS comprises of the following products:

• 
  Veritas Storage Foundation combines Symantec’s industry-leading file system solution and volume management solution to create a highly available robust foundation for Oracle data. The journal file system restarts in seconds for fast failovers. Logical volumes support highly available high performance storage configurations. Database specific components such as direct I/O accelerate database read and write performance while simplifying the manageability of database data. Storage Foundation provides database-specific optimizations for Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle RAC databases.
• Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System builds upon Symantec’s industry leading file system to provide a solution that allows parallel access to data across all members of a cluster. The time required to mount a file system in an event of failover is eliminated as the file system can be mounted on all the nodes in a cluster. It improves failover time. Cluster File System provides cache coherency and POSIX compliance across nodes, ensuring data changes are simultaneously and atomically seen by all cluster nodes.
• Veritas Cluster Server clusters critical applications and resources, eliminating planned and unplanned downtime. Special agents for OEBS Components, Concurrent Manager, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle database ensure maximum application availability by monitoring and centrally managing all the critical components of your business.
• Veritas Cluster Server agent for Oracle e-Business Components starts the Oracle e-Business Components while taking them online, stops them while taking them offline, monitors them for critical processes, and cleans the environment in case of any issues. This agent is packaged with the VCS license.
• For more information, refer to About the VCS Agent for Oracle e-Business Components.
• Veritas Cluster Server agent for Oracle e-Business Concurrent Manager starts the Oracle e-Business Concurrent Manager while taking it online, stops it while taking it offline, monitors it for critical processes, and cleans the environment in case of any issues. This agent is packaged with the VCS license.
• For more information, refer to About the VCS Agent for Oracle e-Business Concurrent Manager.
• Veritas Cluster Server agent for Oracle Database and Net Listener starts the Oracle Database and Database Net Listener while taking them online, stops them while taking them offline, monitors them for critical processes, and cleans the environment in case of any issues. This agent is packaged with the VCS license.
• Veritas Cluster Server agent for Oracle Application Server starts the Oracle Application Server Components while taking them online, stops them while taking them offline, monitors them for critical processes, and cleans the environment in case of any issues. This agent is packaged with the VCS license.

Additional information about the Veritas agents is available in the following documents:

• Veritas™ High Availability Agent for Oracle e-Business Components Installation and Configuration Guide
• Veritas™ High Availability Agent for Oracle Application Server Installation and Configuration Guide
• •Veritas™ High Availability Agent for Oracle e-Business Concurrent Manager Installation and Configuration Guide

Download the complete white paper.