Infrastructure Services

Infrastructure Services

Arc DBA Consulting has system, virtualization, network, and storage engineers and architects with specialized experience in supporting Oracle database and applications systems. Collectively, they support every major O/S, virtualization, network and storage vendor. Above are logos for most of these vendors – though the list is not comprehensive. While some of our engineers, such as our NetApp storage administrator, specialize in working with just one vendor, many have worked with a wide variety of vendors.

We are not in the business of providing generalized IT infrastructure support – there are plenty of vendors and consulting companies who do this, and do it well. Instead, we provide senior engineers and architects for the entire infrastructure stack who can assist our Oracle enterprise architects and DBAs when needed in resolving problems — typically those impacting production performance — within a particular stack to which the enterprise architect has isolated the problem. The infrastructure specialist has the capability and tools to drill-down to the specific root cause and assist the relevant customer team in addressing it, either by tuning, reconfiguring, patching, or if no permanent solution is available, by suggesting a temporary workaround until the vendor can address the underlying problem. Our infrastructure engineers have worked closely with many of our Oracle enterprise architects and DBAs over the years on various projects for multiple clients. This close working relationship has allowed our infrastructure engineers to develop a shorthand with our Oracle staff that enables them to collaborate quickly to fix pressing customer issues.

Our infrastructure engineers have extensive experience supporting Oracle database technologies and Oracle applications, having configured the OS, virtual machine, network, and storage tiers to meet Oracle database and applications pre-installation requirements. In fact, many of our infrastructure admins also have experience performing certain Oracle DBA tasks themselves, having taken on additional responsibilities over the years not typically associated with their given infrastructure expertise. For example:

• Several of our network and system administrators have taken over or automated all installation aspects of Oracle RAC database systems from the customer’s DBA team for large RAC database rollouts.
• Our VMware engineers have intimate knowledge of Oracle product configuration and licensing considerations on VMware, having led enterprise-wide reorganizations of Oracle database and applications VMs to bring such deployments into Oracle licensing compliance.
• Our storage engineers have consulted for many Oracle shops and know how to optimally configure RAID levels and NFS parameters on volumes containing Oracle database, software and applications code.