The best thing about disaster recovery plans is that they are only needed in a disaster. But all too often businesses only discover problems with their plans during a disaster. Should this happen, disaster recovery becomes even more complicated – and political. One effective solution is to deploy Full Stack Disaster Recovery, an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service.
Holistic recovery
Historically, DR plans are developed at the application level. In the event of a localised disaster, applications are recovered according to business importance. In an age where resources were heavily constrained, this line-of-business approach made perfect sense, allowing an organisation to resume skeleton operations as quickly as possible.
Now that IT plays a role in every aspect of operations, however, this linear approach to disaster recovery is too slow and limited. This is why Oracle has introduced the Full Stack Data Recovery to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service.
At the most basic level, full-stack DR allows your business to recover Oracle platforms, non-Oracle applications, and infrastructure simultaneously. This means that your organisation can be up and running much more quickly following a significant system failure.
Why not choose co-location?
In the past, businesses had the option of configuring a co-located data centre that could operate as a fail-over if the primary data centre was out of action. And at a time when on-premise data centres were the only infrastructure option, ‘co-lo’ was an effective, albeit costly, option.
The normalisation of hybrid cloud operations has changed DR requirements, however. Your business could choose to build a co-lo fail-over in the cloud – but under a resource billing model, this approach would be more costly than necessary.
By choosing full-stack DR, you have the same fail-over capabilities but without the cost of operating a full mirror of your infrastructure. Instead, your data is replicated to a more cost-effective storage tier just in case it is required.
Full Stack DR is smart
Under a traditional co-lo model, services would simply switch to the backup location automatically if they went offline. Oracle Full Stack DR is smarter, generating, running, and monitoring your disaster recovery plans for services and applications deployed in your tenancy.
In fact, Full Stack DR evaluates the topology and deployment characteristics of your application stacks and automatically creates a dedicated Disaster Recovery (DR) workflow for recovering all the components of the application stack in another region. As your topology changes, Full Stack DR notifies you of potential recovery problems, prompting your team to update the plan to ensure it is always workable and ready to use. The use of automation at every stage of the planning and execution stages will accelerate your response to issues and reduce the potential for human error.
Importantly, Full Stack DR operates at the service level, so there is no impact on other services running in your tenancy – you can fail over a single service in the event of an issue. When a problem is encountered, Full Stack DR provides recovery for the entire application stack (business system) instead of recovery of individual components such as databases or compute instances.
To learn more about Oracle Full Stack DR and what it could do for your business, please give us a call.