High Availability Oracle s clustering technology has been on the market for 5 years and is a proven winner. The coming release, Oracle Real Application Clusters offers near linear scaling of all applications, with total transparency, therefore reducing the IT resources requires to implement and maintain a highly available solution. IBM s clustering technology runs slower as you add nodes and is designed for BI applications which represent a small portion of the database market. Oracle warranties zero data loss and zero downtime through superior high availability features. DB2 lacks advanced high availability features such as accelerated failover, automated standby and online reorganization.
Direct consequences are higher levels of downtime and their associated costs to the business.
Oracle provides Transparent Application Failover as a standard feature of its Net8 software to automate the failover of clients and applications to a surviving node or instance in the case of a system failure. This feature is not supported with DB2 UDB and would require the purchase of additional software to provide similar capabilities. Oracle includes automated Standby Database support for high-availability requirements. Oracle includes as standard features Recovery Manager along with a GUI interface in Enterprise Manager to handle of backup and recovery operations. IBM requires an extra cost product, Tivoli Storage Manager, to provide similar capabilities.