F5 Adds Oracle Database Support To Its Application Delivery Controller

F5 Networks has announced a new portfolio of tools designed to help IT managers more easily administer and optimize their Oracle Database deployments. The Application Ready Solution, which builds on F5's existing solutions for Oracle applications such as Oracle E-business Suite and Fusion Middleware, delivers capabilities specifically for the database, including visibility into database performance and improved data replication. F5 has integrated their BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and WAN Optimization module with Oracle Database, including Real Application Clusters (RAC), Data Guard, Streams, Recovery Manager and DB Firewall.

The solution is aimed at helping database administrators more effectively handle the expansion of databases by allowing them to perform routine maintenance without disruption, ensure service level agreements, improve disaster recovery via faster replication and data backups via the wide area network (WAN), and scale databases to a global user community, F5 officials say.

To aid in monitoring the health and managing the connections of Oracle Database, the solution inserts F5's Big-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) as a proxy between the application tier and the database tier. Big-IP LTM can then watch for and report on conditions that affect the database servers and performance levels. Connections from the application to the database can be more effectively and automatically managed, eliminating, for example, the need for database administrators to manually adjust application servers whenever changes are made to a database.

The support for Oracle Database also includes integration of F5's Big-IP WAN Optimization Module. The tool is designed to optimize and accelerate data replication between databases instances over WANs. It reduces the volume of data transmitted and offloads processing for network compression, network optimization, and SSL encryption from Oracle Database servers into the F5 module, company officials report. The WAN optimization tool also helps companies with operations around the world keep data synchronized in the multiple database copies they've created to support their growing user base.

Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group says that  "assuring business continuity and disaster recovery with large databases can make it difficult to meet SLAs for recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. By providing tools for enhanced database health monitoring and centralized management, F5 and Oracle solutions can help IT teams improve database efficiencies and reduce operations costs."Byer, a garment manufacturer, has been using F5's software to help support its Oracle applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite--all of which are mission critical, says Mandar Ghosalkar, application infrastructure manager. While Ghosalkar is not yet using the Application Ready Solution for Oracle Database, he plans on adding it to his F5 suite. In particular, he believes the ability to create virtual connections between the applications and database instances will make it easier load balance between the database instances. "In my previous life I was a DBA so I understand how important it is to abstract the connectivity layer. We used to come up with all kinds of creative ways," he says. "This will make it very easy to create the virtual connecting to the database instances."

He says he's also looking forward to the WAN optimization capability. "Everyone talks about disaster recovery, and if you want to put in a good disaster recovery mode, you need good WAN optimizers so that replication is optimized. From a disaster recovery perspective, it is essential," Ghosalkar says.

The Application Ready Solution for Oracle Database deployments is available now.