The MAA Silver reference architecture is designed for databases that can't afford to wait for a cold restart or a restore from backup, should there be an unrecoverable database instance or server failure. This architecture may be suitable for production applications that are business critical and need to reduce downtime for local failures and most common planned maintenance activities.
The MAA Silver architecture is built on the foundation of the MAA Bronze architecture, and adds Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) active-active clustering for minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure, as well as zero database downtime for most common planned maintenance events.
The most optimized Oracle RAC Platform with lowest application brownouts, integrated MAA configuration best practices and database and system optimizations for scaling, high availability and quality of service is Oracle's Exadata Database Machine, Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer (Exadata Cloud@Customer Gen 2) or Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure (Exadata Cloud Service Gen 2).
Just like in the MAA Bronze architecture, Recovery Manager (RMAN) provides database-optimized backups to restore availability should there be a complete cluster outage or disaster.
As shown in the table below, the MAA Silver level of service lets you dramatically decrease expected downtime for hardware failures, and brings most planned downtime due to software and hardware upgrades down to zero, when compared to the MAA Silver level of service.
| Unplanned Outage | RTO/RPO Service Level Objectives1 |
|---|---|
| Recoverable node or instance failure | Single digit seconds 2 |
| Disasters: corruptions and site failures | Hours to days RPO since last backup or near zero with Recovery Appliance |
| Planned Maintenance | |
| Software/hardware updates | Zero 2 |
| Major database upgrade | Minutes to hour |
1 RPO is zero unless explicitly specified
2 To achieve zero downtime or lowest impact for online processing, apply MAA application checklist best practices. For long running transactions such as batch operations, it's best to defer outside the planned maintenance window.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures, click the graphic above, or click Next.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.