Emergency Investigation and Correction of Production System Down
Moving an Entire IT Room
A major Ontario university recently engaged The DBA Shoppe on a cDBA contract to perform a study of the feasibility of supporting its databases through a move of the entire IT room to make way for a long overdue renovation and retrofit. The databases were essential to the operation of the faculty and student population and could not be down for more than one business day. The DBMS versions that were currently supporting numerous applications were being de-supported by Oracle; the application server was no longer supported by Oracle; the client tier had diverged over several years into a difficult to manage combination of hardware, operating systems and web browsers…and, it all had to move physical rooms, be brought up on new hardware and be completed within a very tight budget.The first step that The DBA Shoppe performed was to seek out pre-existing documentation from any previous attempts to move and to interview all known stakeholders and interested parties. This involved meeting with many different department representatives to piece together a complete picture of the challenges and hurdles. The next step was to document the different tiers and components of the environments and the challenges that were specific to each or common to all. The final step was to design a phased path forward that would allow implementation with the maximum ability to pause after each phase before starting the next. The phases that fell out of the report and project plan included Investigation and Planning, Project Foundations, Implementation to Oracle 10 Development and Production Environments and Retirement of Oracle 8 Environment and Further Improvements.
The cDBA results provided a detailed, documented path forward for the client and gave direction and clarity to the issues that would be involved in the move.
At last word, the plan produced was being successfully implemented by the university’s information technology department headed up by several experienced and skilled full-time DBAs – a win-win result for the client, The DBA Shoppe, the faculties and their students and a job well done.