“Instead of having
to back up,
troubleshoot, or
patch 100 systems,
we maintain only
one system.”
—Marshall Romberg, Sabre Holdings
small applications get to enjoy the added
reliability and availability of an Oracle RAC
solution—which would be difficult to justify
for dozens of individual projects outside of a
shared environment.
It’s much faster to ramp up new projects
as well. Instead of having to procure, certify, and deploy hardware
and software, and then build databases, configure runtime parameters, and so forth, the entire infrastructure is already implemented,
tested, and ready to provision. “It’s a simple matter of creating a
schema, which takes about half an hour,” Romberg says. “We let
people focus on servicing our customers and solving business problems, rather than worrying about the database. If and when we see
resource contention, our plan is to put certain services on certain
nodes and use the Oracle Database Resource Manager feature to
guarantee minimum levels of service to each of the areas.”
Sabre’s investment in a private database cloud based on Oracle technologies started to pay off after just a
fe w projects, says Marshall Romberg, an enterprise data architect at Sabre. “The savings just keep rolling in.”
database clusters—either for shared or for standalone applications.
“When we install Oracle RAC and Oracle Database 11g, we do it
the same way every time,” he concludes. “Configuration, monitoring, alerting, backup—it just comes automatically. We have one
standard solution that we know how to run really, really well.”
CLOUD EXCEPTIONS
Romberg cautions that a shared database cloud isn’t ideal for every
project or application.
For example, Sabre’s private database cloud is optimized to provide
the best overall performance for every project across the board, rather
than being specifically optimized for a single application.
In general, Sabre’s private database cloud is appropriate for any
project requiring half a server or less of capacity. If a project needs
multiple servers, Sabre will not recommend that it be a part of the
shared environment because that application drives enough capacity
to efficiently use its own dedicated hardware. One such project is
the Air Travel Shopping Engine, which is implemented as a primary
master Oracle RAC cluster of four nodes, and a replicated four-node
Oracle RAC cluster. Oracle GoldenGate replicates the master data to a
“reader farm” of 8 two-node Oracle RAC clusters.
In the past Sabre used large symmetric multiprocessing systems
for this type of application—which, according to Romberg, are much
more expensive than an equivalent Oracle RAC environment. “The
more you need to scale, the quicker the cost curve goes up,” he
states. “With Oracle RAC, we have been able to achieve the same
levels of performance and reliability. We’re able to scale very easily by
adding blades as we need them.”
Thanks to the standards that Romberg and other enterprise archi-
tects have established, it’s relatively easy to create and scale these
EASY CLOUD MANAGEMENT
Sabre uses Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor its private database cloud, including receiving alerts, scheduling backups, monitoring database activity, and investigating performance problems.
“The Oracle RAC environment is really easy to manage,” Romberg
says. “We have used Oracle RAC for a long time and have seen steady
improvement from Oracle9i Database to Oracle Database 10g to
Oracle Database 11 g, especially in the area of self-management.
Oracle RAC is much simpler to operate and run with Oracle Database
11 g. It’s working really well for us.”
David Baum ( david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer
based in Santa Barbara, California.
NEXT STEPS
LEARN more about
Oracle Database 11g
oracle.com/us/products/database
Oracle Real Application Clusters
oracle.com/us/products/database/options/real-application-clusters
Oracle Enterprise Manager
oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-manager
Oracle cloud computing solutions
oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud
READ more about private database clouds
Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds (white paper)
bit.ly/qZxQEm
Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds (slide show)
bit.ly/o04p0p
