Running your mission-critical applications in the cloud can be a great way to optimize your IT operations. Microsoft Azure offers security, reliability, and performance features that support running your mission-critical workloads. Veritas InfoScale's integration with Azure enables you to streamline your mission-critical workloads in Azure. InfoScale further minimizes the risk of downtime and data loss to help keep your mission-critical applications up and running in the cloud all the time.
Veritas InfoScale is a software-defined optimization solution for mission-critical applications that abstracts applications from their underlying hardware and software resources. That abstraction enables enterprise-grade optimizations around business continuity, performance, and infrastructure agility across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
InfoScale has advanced integration with Azure that simplifies the deployment and management of your mission-critical applications in the cloud:
- Business continuity – InfoScale provides complete high availability and recovery automation for your applications, with a very similar user experience in both on-premises and Azure environments.
- Optimized resource utilization – InfoScale supports multiple high availability configurations that can be cost-optimized depending on the environment – production or development/testing. With Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS), you can build cost-effective shared storage clusters using Azure native compute and storage infrastructure to significantly increase application performance and data resiliency.
- Performance – Azure Ultra Disks provide one of the highest levels of performance available in the cloud. Using Azure Ultra Disks’ and InfoScale SmartIO intelligent caching, you can significantly improve performance for mission-critical applications without increasing your resource footprint.
- Geographic redundancy – Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) provides high availability for your applications across Azure zones and regions, and between on-premises data centers and Azure – minimizing the likelihood of downtime in the event of a local or regional outage.
- Service level management –InfoScale’s Virtual Business Service (VBS) feature is aware of the complete business service provided by multi-tiered applications. VBS manages high availability for all the application tiers as a single logical service. This means faster recovery and minimal downtime – with no manual intervention.
Figure 1 will give you an idea of what this might look like in your Azure environment.
How InfoScale works in Azure
To simplify the configuration of high availability, InfoScale ships with an array of agents that integrate into various third-party applications. InfoScale also provides agents explicitly written to integrate with Azure, which allows you to perform operations such as provisioning disk, registering IPs with DNS, or provisioning VMs with RESTful APIs in Azure environments.
InfoScale’s agents bind to Azure RESTful APIs to enable operations that make your applications highly available. For example, let's say you have two nodes in an InfoScale cluster in Azure. The expectation is that if one node fails, your enterprise service will failover to the second node to maintain availability. The InfoScale agents that integrate with Azure resources such as Disk, IP, and DNS would be disconnected from the failed node and reconnected to the failover node. When your failed node recovers, InfoScale can reconnect these resources.
Using InfoScale with Oracle Databases in Azure
Now that we know more about how InfoScale works with Azure, let’s talk about how you can use InfoScale to implement a highly available Oracle database in Azure.
Unlike most clustering solutions, InfoScale with Fast Failover enables the rapid failover of Oracle databases by providing an advanced clustered file system that can be mounted on both the active and passive Oracle nodes in parallel. This dramatically reduces failover time. InfoScale also provides deep level customizable database monitoring, automation, orchestration, high availability management, and fault detection while significantly reducing your costs compared to native Oracle functionality.
Oracle databases would utilize system resources such as Azure disk, IP, and DNS resources. When a resource managed by InfoScale fails, InfoScale’s Intelligent Monitoring Framework provides near-instant fault detection at the kernel level and can take corrective action if required – from a simple service restart to a complete node to node failover. If required, redo logs will be applied once the instance is failed over. Since InfoScale manages the entire failover process, your applications simply reattach to the active instance with minimal disruption. Figure 3 shows how InfoScale manages failover operations for an Oracle database in Azure. For more information on how InfoScale interacts with Azure, take a look at InfoScale on Azure: Integration and Implementation.
InfoScale also provides significant performance benefits for Oracle SI databases:
- Improved performance for OLTP workloads using Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) extensions, with the manageability benefits of InfoScale’s file system
- Granular intelligent caching with InfoScale SmartIO that can accelerate read performance in the cloud without the additional cost of higher performance disk services
Do you need automated and robust geographical redundancy? InfoScale’s Global Cluster Option (GCO) combined with Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) or Oracle Data Guard can manage the failover of your Oracle database between clusters in different Azure zones and regions to protect your Oracle databases from local outages. For more information on how InfoScale works with Oracle databases, check out this blog: Veritas InfoScale Enterprise for Oracle Single Instance with Fast Failover. InfoScale is an Oracle certified solution for database and storage management that helps you improve application performance while also reducing costs.
So that’s an overview of how InfoScale works with Oracle, but what about other applications? InfoScale provides very similar functionality for almost any mission-critical application as well as advanced application migration capabilities that can help you migrate your applications into Azure.
Summary
InfoScale's data management and availability technology, in conjunction with Azure, provides a foundation to run your mission-critical applications in Azure, while meeting your high availability and performance requirements. InfoScale’s high-availability agents for Azure are custom designed to provide maximum uptime and flexibility for applications running in Azure. Please check out the InfoScale solution template in the Azure Marketplace and the InfoScale technical library for more information on InfoScale. Learn more about how you can run business-critical applications on Azure and read Microsoft’s blog.
