As data becomes more and more critical, its availability should not be compromised by any type of outage – whether it’s unscheduled due to a system crash or malfunction, or it’s scheduled due to patches or upgrades to Oracle, the OS, or applications, and storage replacement. Because today, people view scheduled outages differently than 10 years ago. They don’t really care if the outage is scheduled or unscheduled; an outage is an outage. With this in mind, all types of organizations are looking for more uptime: many are striving for five 9s, or only about 6 minutes of unscheduled downtime a year. This is, of course, very difficult to achieve.

With replication, organizations can extend the database and server to minimize outages. One replication method, active- active replication (also known as peer-to-peer, master-to-master, active-active, or multi-active server replication), offers the most promise. Active-active replication is a horizontal scaling of the application over multiple servers that allows propagation of changes to more than one server. If everything is done properly, end users will not see any outages from the application.

This white paper discusses the key considerations to keep in mind when using active-active replication to ensure high availability. We’ll reveal how you can easily and successfully implement this strategy across your enterprise.