SINGAPORE (02/16/2000) - Oracle Corp. has announced the E-Business Continuity Program, targeted at companies of any size involved with e-business. This program will provide the framework to bring together new software developments, professional services and partnerships aimed at eliminating downtime.
This announcement sees Oracle extending high availability across the Oracle Internet Platform, beyond the database server to the middle tier. More high-availability related announcements are expected in the future.
"High availability consists of three parts: failover, disaster recovery, and business continuity," explained Bob Shimp, senior director of product marketing, Internet platform, Oracle.
Targeted at customer creating online call centers, supply chains and Web storefronts, high availability has become a prerequisite for doing business online, he said.
"High availability used to be the concern of businesses at the very high end, such as banks doing sophisticated financial transactions, stock trading," said Shimp.
"The Internet has meant that high availability is required 24 hours a day, as customers can come to the site any time, and high-availability is now a concern for both small and medium-sized enterprises and large businesses," he said.
Oracle also announced Oracle Parallel Fail Safe, its most advanced, high-availability configuration. The software recovers websites in as little as 30 seconds to ensure customers never experience downtime. Touted to be 10 times faster than previous offerings, it will initially be available as a pre-installed, pre-configured software/hardware on Hewlett-Packard's HP 9000 Enterprise Servers.
It is currently undergoing pilot testing in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Oracle's other offerings in this area include Oracle Fail Safe, and Oracle Parallel Server, which recover Web sites in minutes or hours.
Oracle also announced the high-availability offerings for the middle-tier by providing failover and disaster recovery configurations of the Oracle Application Server, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Integration Server.
This functionality is necessary for Internet applications, such as online exchanges and hosted applications from Application Service Providers (ASPs), said Shimp.
As part of Oracle's E-Business Continuity Program, Oracle is also training its consultants and support staff in the deployment of high availability offerings.