EMC VPLEX and Oracle Streched RAC

To build a Oracle RAC database on an Extended Distance Cluster environment you will need to:

  -  Place one set of nodes at Site A and place the other set of nodes at Site B

  -  Use fast dedicated connectivity between the nodes/buildings for Oracle RAC cross instance communication (for example a dedicated wavelength on 

     Wavelength Division Multiplexing over Dark Fiber for links of public, private, SAN sync.)

  -  Place tie breaking voting disk at a third site Use host based mirroring to allow you to host all the data on both sites and keep it synchronously mirrored.

Main benefits of EMC VPLEX Metro in an 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

• Cluster Nodes need only to connect to local VLEX cluster.  No cross site connection is required
• Simplified infrastructure requirements with deployments of Oracle voting disk by using distributed volumes and VPLEX Witness 
• Reduced consumtion of Oracle node CPU cycles and associated with host based mirroring.  Instead, hardware raid provided by VPLEX and the underlying physical arrays provide this function
• Ability to create consistency groups that protect multiple database or application files as a unit
• VPLEX volumes do not require an application downtime or LUN ID changes during storage hardware refresh and migrations
• Compared to a single site deployment model, the extended RAC model provides easy DR testing and validation based on the fact that both sites can actively participate in the workload