Databases are the repositories of a company’s most critical information, and are typically the most complex part of the application stack. They are cumbersome to install and manage, especially when clustering or high availability is involved. However, high-availability cluster configurations are becoming the norm for today’s mission-critical databases.
There are a number of ways that databases can be made highly available, either with features that exist within the database or with the help of external components like the operating system, storage infrastructure or third-party clustering middleware. The huge number of knobs and dials to control these features means that there are many ways for databases to be deployed in non-standard ways. This can jeopardize the stability and performance of applications.
High availability database configurations tend to be highly complex, but once they are designed, they also tend to be duplicated many times with minimal variation. Therefore, automation can be applied to provisioning, upgrading, patching, failover, recovery, scaling and a number of other database procedures. Automating these monotonous tasks is a good way to make sure they are done correctly, and on schedule. Otherwise, no matter how perfectly designed the database, the system will very soon cease to function correctly without proper maintenance. Database and System Administrators can then focus on more critical tasks, such as performance tuning, query design, data modeling or providing architectural advice to application developers.
At the core of ClusterControl is its automation functionality that lets you automate many of the database tasks you have to perform regularly, from deployments, upgrades, discovering and troubleshooting anomalies, recovering from failures, topology changes, running backups and verifying data integrity, scaling and more.
Database automation with ClusterControl:
- Ensures tasks and procedures are approached the same way, which increases business and IT agility
- Centralizes the database management into a single interface
- Ensures DBAs, SysAdmins and developers manage entire clusters efficiently with minimal risks, using industry best practices