Oracle takes steps to reduce Internet downtime

Oracle Corp. is crusading against costly Internet downtime with a new product and services that extend high availability and failover for its Oracle8i database and middleware products.

The company said Wednesday it is shipping Oracle Parallel Fail Safe, a high-end services and database software package that can reduce failover time by a factor of 10 -- to 30 seconds or less.

Oracle also announced it would provide consulting and technical support for high-availability configurations of its mid-tier software: Internet Directory, Integration Server and Application Server.

"With the Internet, customers expect that businesses will be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," said Robert Shimp, senior director of product marketing. "Now every dot-com company has to be thinking about high availability from the day they open their business."

Oracle officials said the company had tested high-availability configurations of the three middle-tier components and would support such configurations for Internet Directory on Solaris, Integration Server for leading Unix flavors and Application Server for Windows NT.

The new Oracle8i Parallel Fail Safe configuration supports HP-UX on HP 9000 servers, with other software and hardware platforms due in the next six months.

An evolution of Oracle's Parallel Server technology, it includes new intelligent fault detection and diagnostics that will report a prospective failure, Oracle officials said.

Aimed at high-end customers, Parallel Fail Safe is accompanied by consulting services and starts in the "hundreds of thousands of dollars," Shimp said.

The announcements are part of Oracle's E-Business Continuity Program.

Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., is at www.oracle.com.