IT Architecture Team Report:
Production Database Architecture

Database software overview

The University's database standard for centralized administrative applications is Oracle on Sun Solaris.  The Oracle version most commonly in use is 9.2, although there are some application exceptions with higher or lower Oracle versions.  The particular version of Oracle may be mandated by the vendor. There is one centralized Sybase application and there are several centralized MS SQL server applications.  The University therefore also supports the Sybase DBMS and MS SQL Server DBMS.

Database Support Services

The OIT Database Administration group provides support for centralized production databases 24 hours a day / 7 days a week.

Metric Information

The University centrally supports more than 35 production databases and well more than 100 total databases.  There are more than 10 production database servers.

Servers/ OS

All centrally supported production Oracle databases are running on Sun servers.  The majority of production databases reside on Sun 4800 servers.  Some are on smaller Sun servers such as model 450s. The standard OS on these servers is Solaris 8.  The OIT UNIX Systems group provides Sun server support.

Storage

All production databases residing on the Sun 4800 servers use storage on an Hitachi 9900 storage array.  Production databases that reside on other Sun servers use storage local to their respective servers.

Monitoring

Production databases are monitored 24/7. In addition to monitoring for outages, OIT conducts proactive monitoring to ensure that databases do not run out of space, perform adequately, and are generally healthy.  OIT uses a variety of tools for monitoring.  These include the Tivoli product line as well as in-house written tools.

Standard Database Architecture

The University's standard database architecture provides for at least 3 databases per application: one for development, one for QA, and one for production.  In many instances the University maintains another database, commonly known as prodcopy (production copy) to permit improved production debugging and performance testing.

Backup Services

The Database Administration group performs nightly backups of all centrally supported databases. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is a key component of the production database backup strategy.

Both logical backups (exports) and physical backups (hot or online backups) protect all production databases. In order for point in time recovery to be possible, the University runs production databases with archive logging enabled.  The standard backup retention for production databases is 10 daily backups, 5 weekly backups, and 12 monthly backups (taken the first of the month). The backup files are managed by Tivoli

Storage Management (TSM).  In order to provide an extra measure of safety and the ability to restore critical data in the event of a disaster at the main data site, the backups are located in a separate building from the source machines

Related Software

The Database Administration Group also supports in-house developed and 3^rd party vendor applications (such as Peoplesoft).  This related software includes the Oracle Application server (OAS), Oracle Webdb, BEA’s Tuxedo, BEA’s Weblogic webserver, Data Mirror and Cognos data stream.