Oracle Fail Safe and Third Party Cold Failover and Clusters

A Cold Failover Cluster can used to protect an Oracle instance from a system or server failure. Their basic function is to monitor a database instance running on a server, and if a failure is detected, to restart the instance on a spare server in the cluster.  Network addresses and file systems are automatically failed over to the backup server.  Clients on the network will experience a period of lockout while the failover takes places and will then be served by the backup server after the database instance is started on the backup server.  A failover can be used to perform system maintenance of the production server for as well. Operation of a Cold Failover Cluster is depicted below.

Oracle provides a Cold Failover Cluster solution for Windows systems called Oracle Fail Safe. Failover Cluster solutions are available for other platforms from third party providers that can also be used for the Oracle Database. Some of these are listed below.

• Hewlett-Packard's ServiceGuard
• IBM's High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP)
• Sun's Sun Cluster
• Veritas's Cluster Server

For more information on these vendors cluster products, refer to the vendors web pages.