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January 24, 2000

Always On: Oracle Offerings To Boost E-Biz Uptime
Products and services to provide Increased availability and improved disaster recovery

By Rick Whiting

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racle this week will unveil a line of high-end failover and disaster-recovery products and services designed to boost the uptime of E-commerce systems. The vendor is counting on its E-Business Continuity offerings to give it an edge over its database rivals at the high end of the E-commerce market.

The new line's flagship product is Oracle Parallel Fail Safe, multiserver software that switches E-commerce applications to backup systems and brings failed Web sites back online within 30 seconds, according to Oracle. The software is designed to offer more advanced capabilities and scalability than Oracle Fail Safe, a two-node failover product that Oracle bundles with its database products. Oracle will continue to offer Oracle Fail Safe to small companies.

Oracle will also sell new configurations of its Oracle Application Server, Oracle Internet Directory, and Oracle Internet Server with failover and disaster-recovery capabilities, says Robert Shimp, Oracle's senior director of Internet platform product marketing. Using these products, IS managers can, for example, install a backup Internet directory to take over if the primary directory fails. The software also provides online administrative capabilities.

Online golf vendor Chipshot.com Inc. uses Oracle Fail Safe to protect the databases that power its Web store and operational systems. While that technology should be sufficient for the near future, Rajeev Goel, chief technology officer at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, says Oracle's new products will likely be needed one day, given Chipshot.com's growth. "As our site grows, downtime becomes more expensive," Goel says.

Oracle's new products are available now, but only on HP 9000 computers. Oracle developed the Parallel Fail Safe software with Hewlett-Packard, and the companies have packaged the new Oracle products with preconfigured, pretested HP servers. E-Business Continuity will also include a range of consulting services; pricing is based on the mix of products and services chosen.

"High availability is one of the highest priorities in the database-management space," says Terilyn Palanca, a Giga Information Group analyst. Oracle's relationship with HP is significant, she adds, because it lets Oracle offer a complete hardware-software package.

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