MediSwitch has installed Oracle GoldenGate in order to achieve realtime bi-direction replication between its two instances of MediSwitch’s Oracle database. Golden Gate has also been used to support a “zero downtime” migration to the Oracle Database Appliance.
The project has enabled MediSwitch to increase service levels from traditional disaster recovery to high availability, offering continued service availability in excess of 99,9%.
The Oracle Database Appliance significantly reduces the complexity of MediSwitch’s legacy environment, replacing the running, upgrading and patching of the legacy system through a multi-vendor strategy with a single-vendor Engineered System.
MediSwitch was looking to remove the single point of failure occurring when running one Oracle database instance. Its applications were all designed with high availability in mind and had been deployed across two servers at separate sites for fault tolerance.
Benefits of the deployment include automatic failover giving users an “always available” experience. Server utilisation was improved as the company no longer had to keep a machine on standby in the event of downtime.
The project was successfully implemented by the Oracle Advanced Customer Services team.
MediSwitch plan to implement GoldenGate replication from their productions database to their data warehouse for realtime data updates to support their future business goals.
“Oracle is simplifying IT by engineering hardware and software to work together, allowing our customers to focus on business innovation and providing the best customer experience to their customers.
“We are excited at how MediSwitch realised significant benefit through their implementation of Oracle GoldenGate and the Oracle Database Appliance,” says Pieter Bensch, VP and MD, Oracle South Africa.
“The Oracle Database Appliance offered us a pay-as-you-grow benefit, not to mention the benefits our customers have achieved through significant performance increases.
“The implementation of Oracle GoldenGate transformed our business from a traditional live/standby to live/live configuration. Significantly, there was a near zero downtime migration on to the new Oracle Database Appliance, which now provides us with exceptional uptime,” says Wayne Botha, IT manager, MediSwitch.
