Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize Your Business-Critical Databases

By Ariff Kassam (Profile)

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Tuesday, August 4th 2009

No enterprise can afford to be down. Whether private or public, Fortune 100 or startup, the objective is the same: to keep the business running, as customers and partners depend on it.

While virtualization technology is being applied to lower costs and improve utilization for Web and application workloads, relational databases are still predominantly deployed on fixed hardware that is often over-sized for peak capacity, and protected by wasteful, active/passive clustering solutions. As organizations are continually being asked to do more with less, many IT professionals are looking to apply virtualization technology for business-critical databases to achieve better application performance, higher server utilization, improved uptime, and lower operating costs.

WHAT IS DATABASE VIRTUALIZATION

Database virtualization software runs between applications and databases for horizontal scaling and continuous availability. It employs a shared-nothing architecture to maintain multiple, active/active database copies running anywhere on the network. The database can run on commodity or midrange systems, on virtual machines, or in remote locations.

The database instances themselves operate completely independently from one another, unaware that they are part of a virtual pool of database servers. Read requests are load balanced for scalability and performance gains. Write requests and database changes are propagated asynchronously to all databases to keep them in sync. Applications typically require little to no modification beyond the use of a special database driver, which talks to the database virtualization server.

If an individual database is taken down for any reason, when it is put back into the cluster, the database virtualization software will automatically resynchronize the data by applying the transactions that it missed while offline. Users can then perform maintenance tasks to the other database servers. All the while, the application never takes an outage. Following are the top 10 reasons to virtualize business-critical relational databases:

REASON 1: ELIMINATE DATABASE DOWNTIME

Despite the need for critical applications to run 24/7, most IT organizations still rely on planned maintenance windows on weekends to perform system maintenance, update database schemas, and upgrade hardware. With many businesses needing to provide global access to these applications to customers in multiple time zones, planned maintenance windows are shrinking and becoming less frequent, making it increasingly difficult to keep database systems up-to-date.

By virtualizing databases with software that offers active/active properties, organizations can distribute application load across a pool of database copies running anywhere on the network. Since each database is independent and has its own consistent snapshot of the data, IT professionals can take individual databases offline for maintenance while the others stay online, without ever having to take the application down.