Oracle ODA and ZFS Appliance Rack and Stack
PART 1 OF EMERALD'S ODA ADVENTURES
We are just at the beginning of a project to migrate our client's Primavera databases and applications onto multiple Oracle Database Appliance X4-2s (ODAs) and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS3-2s (ZSAs) in multiple datacenters, implementing the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture to ensure the highest standard of availability is maintained. They have had issues in the past with their system becoming unavailable during a turnaround and they have acquired these appliances and contracted Emerald Associates to ensure that experience is not repeated.
Today I went to the client's datacenter to assist with racking the servers, client staff as well as Oracle technicians were present. The Oracle technicians were principally responsible for racking the servers. I was mainly there to check the cabling after setup was complete, as a previous ODA installed for this client was improperly cabled which caused some initial issues.
The Oracle techs were quick and efficient. I was particularly impressed with the tech who cabled the servers after they were installed into the racks. He worked with a practiced hand, obviously born from long experience with this kind of work, being very, very careful about how the cables were run. It was easy to see his expertise, even in a field where I have none (as a software developer, I don't have much call to be in datacenters). I remarked on it afterward and he told me he has often been on the other end, trying to pull a server out and not being able to do it because the cables were run poorly.
There were only a couple of minor issues ... the two fiber channel cables that routed to the server at the bottom of the rack weren't quite long enough to run through the cable management arm of the server. Also, only one cable was run for the ZSA, and it was not labeled in such a way to know if it was for the public interface or the Integrated Lights-Out Manager (ILOM).
After the technician was done I checked all the cable connections and could find no fault with his work. All in all an auspicious start to an exciting project! The next step is checking the IP and DNS configuration and doing the base configuration for the servers.
To find out more please read part 2.
About the Author
Dan MacMillan - Integration Specialist
Dan has been developing software professionally for over 20 years, joining Emerald Associates in 2003. His experience includes accounting, supply chain management, drilling program management, project management, and contract management integration, automation and dashboarding elements.
Dan learned how to program computers as a child by watching his older brother making games on his Commodore 64. His interest in computers and programming drove him to teach himself BASIC, 6502 and 80386 assembly language programming, and then C so that he could write hobby programs. Moving from hobby to professional, Dan did his computer science studies at SAIT in Calgary.
In his first professional programming job, Dan had the autonomy to make mistakes, live with them, learn from them and fix them. He realized that quality in software derives, not from what it does, but from the way it is written, and yields benefits such as having fewer bugs, and being easier to read and change. On that project, Dan transitioned from programming hobbyist to craftsman with a “quality first” focus in his work.