Creating a certification environment

Certification environments are critical especially in systems that depend on others to function. Development often forgets some of the relationships that exist with others and many production sites fail because they did not foresee the consequences they would entail. They suppose important losses for the associated expenses for returning to the previous system or simply for the dysfunctionality that it implies in the business.
 
Client: a telecommunications group development company
 
Need: to create a certification system of several interdependent Unix servers with several Oracle databases distributed in order to be able to carry out the company's certification tasks.
 
Previous situation: a certification system was available but it was not certain that it was exactly the same as the production environment and did not work correctly, among other things the system of replicas between the databases. So it was decided to recreate the environment from scratch.
Members of the project: a DB administrator and a systems technician for the configuration of the servers.
 
System description: HP clusters with Oracle distributed databases.
 
Implementation: From the backups of the production machines the servers were replicated while the databases had to be created in a special way because otherwise the replicas did not work. They pointed to production tables instead of certification tables. The solution consisted in creating the DB, the different users with their schemas and finally the replicated tables one by one pointing to the certification tables.
 
Project cost: 40 days x 2 technicians