Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture

The Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) provides superior data protection and availability by minimizing or eliminating planned and unplanned downtime at all technology stack layers including hardware or software components. Data protection and high availability are achieved regardless of the scope of a failure event - whether from hardware failures that cause data corruptions, or from catastrophic acts of nature that impact a broad geographic area.

MAA also eliminates guesswork and uncertainty when implementing a high availability architecture utilizing the full complement of Oracle HA technologies. MAA Best Practices are described in a series of technical white papers and documentation to assist in designing, implementing, and managing an optimum high availability architecture.

This architecture involves identically configured primary and secondary sites. The primary site contains multiple application servers and a production database using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to protect from host and instance failures. The secondary site also contains similarly configured application servers, and a physical standby database kept synchronized with the primary database by Oracle Data Guard. Clients are initially routed to the primary site. If a severe outage affects the primary site, Data Guard quickly fails over the production database role to the standby database, after which clients are directed to the new primary database to resume processing. The Active Data Guard Option with Real-Time Query (Oracle Database 11g) enables the physical standby database to be open-read only while apply is active; enhancing primary database performance by offloading overhead from ad-hoc queries and reporting to the synchronized standby database at the secondary site. Data Guard 11g Snapshot Standby also makes standby databases an ideal QA system, without compromising data protection. Thus all computing resources are actively utilized, even those that are in a "standby" role - providing maximum return-on-investment along with data protection and availability.

The architecture presented above is only one example of an MAA implementation. The rich set of Oracle High Availability features provide customers with the flexibility to implement an MAA architecture optimized for specific business requirements.