Open Source Today

Implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that will impact every division of a company is an intriguing proposition. A lot is expected of such a system, and when we were tasked with this undertaking at our company, we did not want to neglect the foundation of it — the database. As we researched this project, it became evident that we could satisfy all the necessary requirements with a combination of products: IBM DB2, Red Hat Linux, as well as Heartbeat, Mon, and ipfail. In this article, I will describe how we built a “bulletproof penguin” one piece at a time.
No Single Point of Failure

We needed a solution that would guarantee high availability and failover, so we decided to install two database servers implementing DB2’s new High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR). We also wanted to make certain we had no single point of failure in our hardware or software. We purchased a 14-disk storage array (SAN) and allocated one large RAID 5 partition for the database servers to use for storage. Our SAN controller has no single point of failure, so from a hardware perspective, we are on solid footing. Our HADR solution provides no single point of failure from a software perspective. Since we had committed to DB2, we had to use a shared nothing a