What is Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture?

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is Oracle's best practices blueprint based on proven Oracle high availability technologies and recommendations. The goal of MAA is to achieve the optimal high availability architecture at the lowest cost and complexity.

• MAA defines HA best practices for a comprehensive set of Oracle products - Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Applications and Grid Control.
• MAA considers various business SLAs to make these best practices as widely applicable as possible.
• MAA leverages database grid servers with commodity servers and storage grid with resilient low cost storage to provide highly resilient, lower cost infrastructure.
  
• MAA evolves with new Oracle versions and features.
• MAA is hardware and OS independent.

MAA Demonstrations

MAA demonstrations quickly illustrate the unique levels of high availability, data protection and enhanced quality of service provided by the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture.

MAA Best Practice Publications

MAA publications consist of a series of architectural, configuration and operational HA best practice blueprints using Oracle technologies. For example, the following diagram represents an HA architecture involving the Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server.

Example of an HA Configuration using MAA Best Practices

This architecture involves identically configured primary and secondary sites. The primary site contains multiple application servers and a production database using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to protect from host and instance failures. The secondary site also contains similarly configured application servers, and a physical standby database kept synchronized with the primary database by Oracle Data Guard. Clients are initially routed to the primary site. If a severe outage affects the primary site, Data Guard quickly fails over the production database role to the standby database, after which clients are directed to the new primary database to resume processing. The Active Data Guard Option with Real-Time Query (Oracle Database 11g) enables the physical standby database to be open-read only while apply is active; enhancing primary database performance by offloading overhead from ad-hoc queries and reporting to the synchronized standby database at the secondary site.

The various HA best practice publications are grouped under the following categories: