Aiming for High Availability
Developing Redundancy to achieve HA
Posted on 1/28/2007 (originally published in print on 5/1/2004)
by Lorne Kaufman
The CIO's dream starts the same way every time: delivering and deploying a High Availability (HA) PeopleSoft system to the enterprise for internet and intranet use. A dream is how close many organizations feel they can get to this goal, but I am here to help you make this dream a reality. As an IT executive and technology connoisseur, it is my job to integrate the cool technology with the practical needs of the business while keeping costs in mind. In this article, I will describe how any organization can take advantage of some or all components of an HA PeopleSoft system without breaking the budget, simply by taking advantage of redundancy opportunities within their infrastructure.
There are many reasons why organizations deploy redundant components in their infrastructure: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their end users, system availability requirements, performance requirements, as well as maintenance schedules. All of these are valid reasons to deploy one or all of the PeopleSoft architectural components for redundancy and HA. The components that I will be discussing are:
Network/Appliances
Internet service
Routers
Firewalls
Load balancers
Web Server
Clustering
Application Server
Domain configurations
Network and Appliances
Internet Service
Unless the network is functioning, the rest of the components do not matter. It is a best practice to have two different vendors provide internet services for your organization. This ensures that access to the system will still be available in the unfortunate event of a service provider failure. This component of redundancy does not need to cost a lot of money. It can be accomplished by leveraging a frame circuit, a cable modem or even a satellite link as backup. There are multiple ways to configure a solution: Primary/Backup, load balancing, and active/standby.
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