Overview

This section briefly discusses the key elements that make up the OAS enterprise solution stack deployed on Dell infrastructure, including:

• OAS three-tier enterprise deployment topology
  • Web tier: Load balancers and web servers
  • Application tier: Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) and OAS/Business Intelligence (BI)
  • Data tier: Oracle RAC Database
• Dell PowerFlex enterprise infrastructure
  • PowerFlex Storage Data Clients (SDCs): Compute-only nodes
  • PowerFlex Storage Data Servers (SDSs): Storage-only nodes
  • PowerFlex File Nodes: File (compute) nodes
• OAS data visualization, analyses, and sources

The following sections provide a brief description of these various key elements.

OAS three-tier enterprise topology

Figure 1 shows a typical three-tier OAS solution topology that is recommended for deployment in an enterprise environment. The recommended topology divides the three tiers (web, application, and database) into separate security or firewall zones. The components in the three tiers are deployed on two or more physical hosts for high availability and performance. Most of the data for all three tiers resides on highly available shared storage systems.

Figure 1.   Generic OAS highly available/scale-out enterprise reference topology

Web tier (LBR and web server)

The web tier consists of load balancers (LBR) and the web servers. It is recommended to deploy a pair of load balancers, typically configured to operate in an active-passive model, for high availability. Similarly, it is recommended to deploy two or more web servers across two or more physical hosts (WEBHOST1, WEBHOST2, WEBHOSTn, and others) for high availability.

The LBRs can either be hardware devices such as F5 Big-IP, Progress Kemp Hardware LoadMaster, Citrix, and others. They can also be virtual devices such as Nginx, Progress Kemp Virtual LoadMaster, HAProxy, and the like. LBR route and balance the incoming requests from OAS end users (from the Internet) to one of the web servers in the web tier. It also routes and balances requests from the internal users or components (OAS administrators) from within the corporate network. LBR also provides security enhancements by redirecting secure (HTTPS) external weblinks to internal application (HTTP) weblinks. LBR can also help increase performance to the architecture by terminating or off-loading the SSL requests.

Although traffic from LBR can be routed directly to the application tier, it is recommended to deploy web servers (example Oracle HTTP Servers (OHS)) in the web tier. Deploying web servers in the web tier offers several advantages such as faster fail-over if a WebLogic Server (WLS) or OAS instance fails, more security with a public DMZ, and faster delivery of static content. The web servers are configured to authenticate the end users and route the HTTP requests to the Oracle Fusion Middleware products and application (OAS) components that are running in the application tier.

Application tier (Middleware - WLS and OAS)

The application tier hosts the business, application, visualization, and analytics logic. In an OAS enterprise solution, the application tier consists of two or more physical servers where we install and configure a cluster of Oracle FMW products such as the Oracle WebLogic Server and the OAS (also referenced as Business Intelligence (BI)).

The OAS configuration involves the creation or the extension of the WLS or the BI domain. Each domain consists of Java components (Administration Server, Managed Server), non-Java components (software binaries, configuration files, BI Server, BI Scheduler, BI Presentation Server, and others), and one or more of the Node Managers. OAS or the BI domain and its components can be deployed on a single host, but it can also be deployed to scale-out horizontally across two or more physical hosts (BIHOST1, BIHOST2, BIHOSTn), forming a BI domain cluster. The BI domain cluster that spread across multiple hosts provides the advantage of high availability and the ability to service increased client request loads.

Database tier (Oracle RAC Database)

This tier consists of the backend Oracle database that is required to store the OAS component schemas and the Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) policy stores. In the enterprise topology it is recommended that we have a highly available database, and hence, an Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) database is recommended for the same.

This tier also consists of the shared storage infrastructure that is used by all three tiers to store their respective software binaries, domain configuration files, metadata, database schemas, etc. For maximum availability, a highly available Storage Area Network (SAN) and/or Network Attached Storage (NAS) based shared storage is recommended to avoid a single point of failure.

Dell PowerFlex Infrastructure: SDS and SDC

The Dell PowerFlex is a software-defined infrastructure that provides businesses a comprehensive, reliable, and a scalable solution. It is designed to provide a complete life cycle management while delivering exceptional performance for the various kinds of mission critical enterprise workloads.

The PowerFlex infrastructure consists of:

• The PowerFlex management layer: Contains the highly available PowerFlex Controller nodes. The PowerFlex Management Platform (PFMP) and the centralized console - PowerFlex Manager – is deployed in this layer for the provisioning and the management of the entire PowerFlex infrastructure.
• The PowerFlex network layer: Contains the high bandwidth and the highly available networking switches for both management and secure data traffic.
• PowerFlex Storage Data Server (SDS) nodes: These are the nodes dedicated for providing the general-purpose software-defined storage for client-side applications. It supports both block-based and file-based storage pools that are created using storage media available across multiple SDS nodes.
• PowerFlex Storage Data Client (SDC) nodes: These are the nodes dedicated for providing the general-purpose compute resources and can access the data served by the SDS nodes. Client-side applications like Oracle Database, OAS, and others that require highly available enterprise shared storage are typically installed on these SDC nodes.
• PowerFlex file nodes: These are the nodes dedicated for providing the software-defined NAS storage. These act as NAS front-end compute nodes that intrinsically work with the backend SDS nodes that store the NAS data.

One of the main features of OAS is to provide the ability for data visualizations and analyses. Visualization enables one to explore, organize, display, save, and share raw data from one or more data sources in a graphical way. Similarly, analyses enable issuing queries against the raw datasets available in one or more data sources and find answers, insights, and trends without requiring technical knowledge of the data’s format. OAS supports connecting to many types of structured and unstructured data sources for visualization and analysis. Examples of supported data sources include, but are not limited to, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark SQL, Apache Hive, Google Analytics, MongoDB, Microsoft Excel, MySQL, Teradata, and others. See Certification - Supported Data Sources for a complete list of data sources supported by OAS.