A leading UK healthcare Operator enhances performance and availability using Oracle10g RAC

About The Client

Our client is a leading healthcare operator based in UK.

Overview & Challenges

The client’s current system

• store personal characteristics of patients, such as demographic information which may be important for the patient’s future treatment and care, such as allergies, visits to A&E and adverse reactions to drugs
• ensure the security of systems required to restrict access to the national and local systems
• provide a secondary uses service, using anonymised data for business reports and statistics for research and planning purposes interface with all the local IT systems.

The Solution

Oracle RAC Delivers High Reliability and Availability

Today, the purpose built application database run on an 10g Oracle Real Application Clusters. Each cluster is comprised of 3 Sun FIRE 25K servers running on Solaris 10 accessing a single Oracle database hosted on Sun Storage S1 storage.

RAC - Proving it’s value

RAC enables multiple servers to share a single Oracle database in a clustered environment (each server, or node, runs a single Oracle instance). Client has experienced several occasions where the Oracle instance on one of the RAC nodes crashed due to an operating system problem. In these situations, the database remained available through the Oracle instances running on the surviving RAC nodes and customers were not impacted. Client has also benefited from their RAC environment whenever maintenance operations require that Oracle instances be stopped and restarted. As noted above, these operations can be completed on one instance at a time in a rolling manner. There is never an interruption in database availability since there is always another functioning Oracle instance available to support customer activity.