As part of McGill University's Banner 8 upgrade we undertook a project to replace our hardware and to make Banner as highly available to the users as possible. This presentation will be of interest to the architects and decision makers as it will look at the approach that we took to define key metrics, compromises that were made to stay within budget, how we distributed the project into three phases and a review of lessons learned.

Additionally, it will be of interest to technical DBAs as it will also look at:
• New approaches to recovery using SAN snapshots and their integration with Oracle RMAN
• Configuration and setup of Oracle flashback
• Tips and tricks to use Dataguard including the new 11g feature called snapshot Dataguard
• Setting up transparent application failover and the use of Oracle services for INB and Banner Self-Service.
• Approach to disaster recovery for UC4 App manager, LMB and BIFEP.

The presentation will wrap up with a review of common recovery scenarios and downtimes that McGill experienced over the past 10 years and how the recovery time for each has been drastically reduced with our new architecture.