Siemens opts for Oracle in bid to meet system availability targets

Siemens Information and Communication Mobile Group (IC Mobile) has partnered with Oracle Corp in a bid to improve the value of the services it delivers to its customers - and to meet the stringent availability and response time requirements of its @vantage telecommunications platform.

Siemens has built its global @vantage on Oracle`s latest database technology - Oracle9i Real Application Clusters - designed to provide protection against data loss and help ensure continuous system uptime.

The @vantage platform is a layered architecture that provides the development environment for Siemens products, such as prepaid services and micropayments.

"Providing services to mobile customers puts heavy requirements on a service provider`s infrastructure," says Nina Kalt, president (Enabling Services) at Siemens IC Mobile.

"It is obviously critical that the infrastructure for our @vantage architecture be continuously available and scale to meet the needs of our customers. The open standards-based Oracle9i Real Application Clusters architecture meets our technical requirements and gives us competitive price performance," she says.

Oracle9i Real Application Clusters is one of the few major components of the @vantage solution platform that Siemens IC Mobile does not build itself.

Siemens is also using Oracle Data Guard, a feature of Oracle9i Database, for high availability. It provides an interface that acts as a single point of control and automation, to manage the creation, maintenance, fail-over and switchover of standby databases.

"By using standby database technology, Siemens IC Mobile can protect its data from unplanned failures in the event of disasters, human error or corruption," says Deon Roos, product manager at Oracle SA,

"More importantly, if the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or an unplanned outage, Oracle Data Guard can switch any standby database to take on the production database`s role, thus minimising the cost of downtime and helping ensure zero data loss," he notes.