Oracle RAC Remote Administration

By 2008, a specialty product promotions firm operating throughout the country was feeling the economic downturn in their market space. They looked at a variety of ways to cut their cost of operations that included nearly $1,000,000 per year for salaries of their IT staff - software developers, system administrators, database administrators and project managers. The decision was made to outsource their IT and to phase out their own client management software system that had been designed, developed, maintained and hosted in-house, and migrate to an application service provider (ASP) with experience in their industry. It was anticipated that it would take 12-18 months to replatform the client management software and migrate the data. No new application development was to be performed in-house, but the existing systems needed to be able to operate smoothly until the transition was complete.

In 2009, Softer Ingenuity was asked to take on the responsibility of their most critical system - the Oracle Real Application Cluster. This is a complex database management system consisting of a cluster of nodes that access a single database residing on shared storage. (In this instance, the operating system is Red Hat Linux.) This architecture provides high-availability for business critical data. Softer Ingenuity prepared for the engagement by sending a team of three experienced Oracle and Linux administrators to the site to inspect and assess the database and stability of the system, and to document the configuration. For ongoing support, the Softer Ingenuity team monitored the daily health and well-being of the system, ensured daily and weekly RMAN backups were performed, and provided emergency on-call support. Softer Ingenuity assisted in trouble-shooting Oracle errors, problems with backups, and Linux system administration issues, and was there to recover the Oracle database after a hardware failure caused the master node to be unable to see the EMC SAN devices.