TALX Corporation Boosts System Availability and Scalability with Oracle Real Application Clusters

Logistics Insight Asia - Technology & Market Trends, 15/2/2008

Oracle database clusters on Windows platform delivers fast, fault-tolerant TALX applications and services.

TALX Corporation, an Equifax business and a leading provider of human resources (HR) and payroll-related services, has deployed Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters to improve the performance, reliability and scalability of critical applications and services relied upon by its thousands of clients.

TALX offers Web-based applications focused on employment-related areas such as hiring, pay reporting, and compliance. TALX's applications enable their 9,000-plus clients to replace slow, paper-based, expensive manual methods and improve employee service.

To meet the critical, timely needs of its clients, TALX's applications require a fault-tolerant, scalable IT infrastructure. In May 2007, the company completed a three-phase migration of core applications onto a foundation of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Partitioning and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on a six-node cluster of four-way HP ProLiant DL580G3 servers running 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

The clustered environment helps to ensure uptime for TALX's homegrown, .NET and C++-based applications such as Work Number, Employment and Income Verification, Epayroll Service, W-2 Express Service, and I-9 Express Service. The clustered environment also offers increased availability of TALX's authentication and authorization service that enables end-user access to its applications. TALX runs mixed workloads including online transaction processing, data loading and batch processing across its cluster.

To manage and monitor its clustered environment, TALX relies on Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g has replaced TALX's custom-built management tools and scripts for monitoring tablespaces, alert log mining and administrator paging, among other tasks. TALX also implemented Oracle Automatic Storage Management, a database volume manager and file system optimized for database access which automates and streamlines performance and storage management for related systems.

Looking into the future, the current plan is for TALX to deploy another cluster at its secondary data center and utilize Oracle Streams to replicate data between its two clustered environments. The company also anticipates increasing reliance on Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET), a feature of Oracle Database that enables efficient access to .NET applications. ODP.NET will also enable TALX developers to further exploit the unique performance, reliability, scalability and security capabilities of Oracle Database including Transparent Application Failover and Fast Application Notification.

TALX, www.talx.com.