A rigorous business impact analysis:

• Identifies the critical business processes in an organization

• Calculates the quantifiable loss risk for unplanned and planned IT outages affecting each of these business processes

• Outlines the effects of these outages

• Considers essential business functions, people and system resources, government regulations, and internal and external business dependencies

• Is based on objective and subjective data gathered from interviews with knowledgeable and experienced personnel

• Reviews business practice histories, financial reports, IT systems logs, and so on

The business impact analysis categorizes the business processes based on the severity of the impact of IT-related outages. For example, consider a semiconductor manufacturer with chip fabrication plants located worldwide. Semiconductor manufacturing is an intensely competitive business requiring a huge financial investment that is amortized over high production volumes. The human resource applications used by plant administration are unlikely to be considered as mission-critical as the applications that control the manufacturing process in the plant. Failure of the applications that support manufacturing affects production levels and have a direct impact on the financial results of the company.

Similarly, an internal knowledge management system is likely to be considered mission-critical for a management consulting firm, because the business of a client-focused company is based on internal research accessibility for its consultants and knowledge workers. The cost of downtime of such a system is extremely high for this business.

A complete business impact analysis provides the insight needed to quantify the cost of unplanned and planned downtime. Understanding this cost is essential because it helps prioritize your high availability investment and directly influences the high availability technologies that you choose to minimize the downtime risk.

Various reports have been published, documenting the costs of downtime in different industries. Examples include costs that range from millions of dollars for each hour of brokerage operations and credit card sales, to tens of thousands of dollars for each hour of package shipping services.

These numbers are staggering. The Internet can connect the business directly to millions of customers. Application downtime can disrupt this connection, cutting off a business from its customers. In addition to lost revenue, downtime can negatively affect customer relationships, competitive advantages, legal obligations, industry reputation, and shareholder confidence.

The business impact analysis determines your tolerance to downtime, also known as recovery time objective (RTO). An RTO is defined as the maximum amount of time that an IT-based business process can be down before the organization starts suffering unacceptable consequences (financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, reputation, and so on). RTO indicates the downtime tolerance of a business process or an organization in general.

The RTO requirements are driven by the mission-critical nature of the business. Thus, for a system running a stock exchange, the RTO is zero or near to zero.

An organization is likely to have varying RTO requirements across its various business processes. Thus, for a high volume e-commerce website, for which there is an expectation of rapid response times and for which customer switching costs are very low, the web-based customer interaction system that drives e-commerce sales is likely to have an RTO of zero or close to zero. However, the RTO of the systems that support back-end operations, such as shipping and billing, can be higher. If these back-end systems are down, then the business may resort to manual operations temporarily without a significant visible impact.

The ability to take orders through the e-commerce website immediately (the RTO) may be more important than the RPO, because lost data can be reloaded later.

The business impact analysis also determines your tolerance to data loss, also known as recovery point objective (RPO). RPO is the maximum amount of data that an IT-based business process can lose without harm to the organization. RPO measures the data-loss tolerance of a business process or an organization in general. This data loss is often measured in terms of time, for example, zero, seconds, hours, or days of data loss.

A stock exchange where millions of dollars worth of transactions occur every minute cannot afford to lose any data. Thus, its RPO must be zero. The web-based sales system in the e-commerce example does not require an RPO of zero, although a low RPO is essential for customer satisfaction. However, its back-end merchandising and inventory update system can have a higher RPO because lost data can be reentered.

A manageability goal is more subjective than either the RPO or the RTO. It results from an objective evaluation of the skill sets, management resources, and tools available in an organization and the degree to which the organization can successfully manage all elements of a high availability architecture. Just as RPO and RTO measure an organization's tolerance for downtime or data loss, your manageability goal measures the organization's tolerance for complexity in the IT environment. When less complexity is a requirement, simpler methods of achieving high availability are preferred over methods that may be more complex to manage, even if the latter could attain more aggressive RTO and RPO objectives. Understanding manageability goals helps organizations differentiate between what is possible and what is practical to implement.

Understanding total cost of ownership (TCO) and objectives for return on investment (ROI) are essential to selecting a high availability architecture that also achieves the business goals of your organization. TCO includes all costs (such as acquisition, implementation, systems, networks, facilities, staff, training, and support), over the useful life of the solution chosen. Likewise, the ROI calculation captures all of the financial benefits that accrue to a given high availability architecture.

For example, consider a high availability architecture in which IT systems and storage at a remote standby site remain idle with no other business use that can be served by the standby systems. The only return on investment for the standby site is the costs related to downtime avoided by its use in a failover scenario. Contrast this with a different high availability architecture that enables IT systems and storage at the standby site to be used productively while in the standby role (for example, for reports or for off-loading the primary system of the overhead of user queries or distributing read-write workload). The return on investment of such an architecture includes both the cost of downtime avoided and the financial benefits that accrue to its productive use while it also provides for high availability and data protection.

Oracle MAA best practices define high availability reference architectures that address the complete range of availability and data protection required by enterprises of all sizes and lines of business.

The Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze MAA reference architectures, or tiers, are applicable to on-premise, private and public cloud configurations, and hybrid cloud. They deliver the service levels described in the following figure.

Each tier uses a different MAA reference architecture to deploy the optimal set of Oracle high availability capabilities that reliably achieve a given service level at the lowest cost and complexity. The tiers explicitly address all types of unplanned outages including data corruption, component failure, and system and site outages, as well as planned outages due to maintenance, migrations, or other purposes.

The Oracle Sharding reference architecture uses these same standard Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum reference architectures as building blocks to provide shard-level high availability, given that each shard is a standalone Oracle Database. The Oracle Sharding reference architecture also includes best practices that address any unique considerations for a sharded database.

Container databases (CDBs) using Oracle Multitenant can exist in any tier, Bronze through Platinum, providing higher consolidation density and higher TCO. Typically, the consolidation density is higher with Bronze and Silver tiers, and there is less or zero consolidation when deploying a Platinum tier.

Oracle Database In-Memory can also be leveraged in any of the MAA tiers. Because the In-Memory column store is seamlessly integrated into Oracle Database, all of the high availability benefits that come from the MAA tiers are inherited when implementing Oracle Database In-Memory.

Oracle Engineered Systems can also exist in any of the tiers. Integrating Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (Recovery Appliance) as the Oracle Database backup solution for your entire data center reduces RPO and RTO when restoring from backups. Leveraging Oracle Exadata Database Machine as your database platform in the MAA reference architectures provide the best database platform solution with the lowest RTO and brownout.

The Bronze tier is appropriate for databases where simple restart or restore from backup is "HA enough." The Bronze tier is based upon a single instance Oracle Database with MAA best practices that use the many capabilities for data protection and high availability included with every Oracle Enterprise Edition license. Oracle-optimized backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) provide data protection and are used to restore availability should an outage prevent the database from restarting.

The Silver tier provides an additional level of high availability for databases that require minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure, as well as many types of planned maintenance. The Silver tier adds clustering technology – either Oracle RAC or Oracle RAC One Node. RMAN provides database-optimized backups to protect data and restore availability should an outage prevent the cluster from restarting.

The Gold tier raises the stakes substantially for business critical applications that cannot accept vulnerability to single points-of-failure. This tier adds database-aware replication technologies, Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate, which synchronize one or more replicas of the production database to provide real time data protection and availability. Database-aware replication substantially enhances high availability and data protection beyond what is possible with storage replication technologies. It also reduces cost while improving return on investment by actively utilizing all replicas at all times.

The Platinum tier introduces several new Oracle Database 12c capabilities and previously available products that have been enhanced with the latest release. These capabilities include Application Continuity, for reliable replay of in-flight transactions that masks outages from users; Oracle Active Data Guard Far Sync, for zero data loss protection at any distance; Oracle GoldenGate enhancements for zero downtime upgrades and migrations; and Global Data Services for automated service management and workload balancing in replicated database environments. Each of these technologies requires additional effort to implement, but they deliver substantial value for the most critical applications where downtime and data loss are not an option.

Oracle Sharding distributes data and workloads across a pool of independent databases (shards) that are presented to the application as a single logical database, also known as a sharded database.

A sharded database is used to provide linear scalability and fault isolation for suitable applications. A sharded database eliminates the possibility of a single physical database being unable to scale to meet application requirements. Similarly, a sharded database prevents a physical database from being a single point of failure for an application due to unplanned outages or planned maintenance.

The Oracle Sharding reference architecture uses the standard Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum reference architectures as building blocks to provide shard-level high availability given that each shard is a standalone Oracle Database. The Oracle Sharding reference architecture also includes best practices that address any unique considerations for a sharded database.

Table 2-1 summarizes the high availability and data protection attributes inherent to each tier. Each tier includes all of the capabilities of the previous tier and builds upon the architecture to handle an expanded fault domain. The various components included and the service levels achieved by each architecture are described in other topics.