FlashGrid Supports Database HA Solution in Microsoft Azure Public Cloud

FlashGrid Inc. announced support for its database HA solution in Microsoft Azure public cloud.

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Company’s software brings the economics, flexibility, and agility of Azure to a range of Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) customers. It allows deploying new applications in the cloud with maximum availability and helps existing enterprise Oracle RAC users realize the benefits of migrating their entire IT infrastructure to Azure.

To enable Oracle RAC in Microsoft Azure, the company provides a software layer that creates the necessary infrastructure required by the database:

• Shared performance storage accessible from all nodes in the cluster

• Multicast enabled network between all nodes in the cluster

• Separate networks for different types of traffic: client, cluster interconnect, and storage

While addressing the requirements, the software stays transparent to the database; it is not involved in the data path from compute to storage. The building blocks of the infrastructure are standard Azure VMs (DS v2 and GS series are supported) and managed SSDs.

HA is achieved by mirroring data between the database nodes. In the unlikely event of a VM, disk, or network component failure on a node, the database will continue running on the surviving nodes. Spreading the cluster nodes across different update and fault domains ensures continuous operation during planned maintenance and also in the event of failure of shared infrastructure.

Performance tests on two DS15_v2 database nodes with sixteen 513GB premium SSD disks per node have yielded 121,597 IO/s under a read-only load, and 53,839 IO/s in a read-write use scenario. The results are comparable to using a dedicated all-flash storage array. IT organizations migrating from legacy on-premises systems have an opportunity for an order of magnitude increase in the performance of their database systems in addition to realizing other benefits of using the public cloud infrastructure.

FlashGrid Cloud Provisioning makes the process of deploying a highly available database cluster in Azure cloud easier and faster than with traditional hardware running on-premises. Even those organizations that previously could not afford the complexity of deploying HA database clusters on-premises now can do it in the cloud.

“We appreciate the fact that FlashGrid has been recognized in Azure documentation for Oracle solutions. Many enterprises have already decided on Microsoft Azure as their cloud of choice for digital transformation. FlashGrid software ensures that mission critical databases can be used in the cloud without compromises on the high standards of availability and performance that businesses rely on. The ability to move key databases to the cloud with confidence makes the journey easier for Azure-bound IT infrastructures,” said Alex Miroshnichenko, CEO, FlashGrid.