Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance - Finger pointing data in binary code on a computer screen with word data loss

5 Compelling Reasons for the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

Reliable recovery is a non-negotiable requirement. And for mission-critical operations, data loss is inexcusable. As you consider your backup options, you will encounter the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, Oracle’s enterprise-class backup solution. Here are 5 compelling reasons it should be at the top of your shortlist.

1. Optimised for Oracle databases

Built by Oracle for Oracle, the Appliance offers deep integration with the Oracle database for enhanced backup options. According to Oracle, the device performs 50x faster than traditional backup solutions when using incremental backups and can deliver sub-second recovery point objectives thanks to its real-time redo transport which sends data directly from DB server memory. Virtual full backup technology accelerates recovery time by as much as 800%.

2. Ultra-high performance

Your Oracle databases continue to grow exponentially and the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance has been designed with this fact in mind. Capacity starts at 2PB and easily scales beyond 282PB. Each appliance delivers 35TB backup and recovery throughput per hour, scaling up to 630TB in a six-rack configuration. This unprecedented capacity allows businesses to capture 6PB of database backups every hour.

3. Powerful management functions

The Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance integrates neatly with other Oracle management tools to help simplify administration. Advanced automation features can reduce database administrator workloads by as much as 80%. The tight integration between database, software and hardware reduces resource requirements, causing TCO to fall by over 30% when compared to solutions from other vendors.

4. Built-in security

Immutable, incremental forever backups are encrypted and compressed as standard, protecting data against loss, corruption, theft or misuse. The Appliance also checks all incoming and replicated backups for Oracle block correctness; any deviations or errors are immediately quarantined for further analysis, helping to stop the spread of ransomware. Backups are further protected by the Exadata architecture which has been tested and hardened to reduce attack surfaces and cybersecurity risk.

5. Reduced costs

The Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance creates savings across several domains. Consolidating enterprise-wide database protection while using database-aware compression and deduplication eliminates inefficient, standalone solutions and shrinks storage requirements by up to 40%. Automated admin tasks reduce workloads by 80%. And incremental forever backups lower networking overheads and operational costs.

As such, Oracle estimates the Appliance achieves a 62% lower total cost of ownership than rival systems. And that is before you consider the value of a system that offers zero data loss protection.

Ready to learn more about the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance? Contact the WTL team the WTL team today to discuss how this solution could revolutionise your backup and disaster recovery strategy.

 

Disaster Recovery As A Service - words with cloud over white background

Recovering quickly from a disaster with DRaaS

Whether caused by nature or human activity, IT disasters have one guaranteed outcome – a drop in productivity. This is why you need a disaster recovery plan that restores operations as quickly as possible. Harnessing the power and flexibility of the cloud, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) makes enterprise-class protections available to businesses of any size.

Co-location for all

The best way to maintain operations during a disaster has always been through the use of co-located data centres. Under this design, businesses operate two data centres; their primary computing location and a duplicate data centre in a different physical location. Data is mirrored between the sites automatically so that if the primary data centre fails, traffic is automatically switched to the second, reducing downtime to a matter of seconds.

Effective and robust, co-located data centres are extremely expensive. Maintaining a duplicate means doubling your data centre costs ‘just in case’ there is an outage.

DRaaS offers a cost-effective alternative, using cloud infrastructure to host duplicate systems. Thanks to virtualised servers and tools like Veeam, there is no need to maintain physical hardware in a backup location. As with traditional co-location design, if the primary data centre goes offline, the cloud-based backup springs into action.

Using DRaaS, businesses can achieve ‘always on’ computing operations – and avoid costs like data centre rental, electricity and cooling and additional staff.

Pick and choose services

A good DRaaS service will offer much more than just a space to host virtual machines in the cloud. Reflecting the pay-as-you-use cloud model, businesses can select additional services that further improve their disaster recovery plans.

Options like a fully managed fail-over service will help to plug any skills or knowledge gaps for instance. Or tools and support to address regulatory and industry compliance requirements.

In this way, DRaaS allows businesses to build disaster recovery protections that perfectly match their requirements without the usual cost and inconvenience of a bespoke DR solution.

Don’t forget the essentials

Out of sight, out of mind? DR systems in the cloud are just as vulnerable as your on-premise servers. This means that you must ensure your DRaaS service provider is offering suitable security protection mechanisms. Things to look for include enterprise-grade security, antimalware, intrusion detection/prevention, and integrity monitoring. They should also provide comprehensive reporting so you can understand and document your security posture.

Go seamless

DRaaS should allow your mission-critical systems to fail over seamlessly. In doing so, your business is protected against local outages that damage productivity, availability, profitability and corporate reputation.

To learn more about WTL’s disaster recovery as a service offering and how it will help your business improve its disaster recovery response, please get in touch.

DRaaS - Plan B

When Plan B goes wrong: Avoiding the pitfalls with DRaaS

When it comes to Disaster Recovery (DR), attention tends to be focused on major disasters like terrorist attacks, floods or large fires. In reality, these types of events are extremely rare – the circumstances under which most businesses require DR are far more mundane.

Jim in accounts deletes a vital spreadsheet, a server crash takes the company ERP system offline, Val opens an infected email attachment and ransomware begins to spread through the network – incidents that companies experience at least once every year.

Or even more regularly.

The human factor

When Computing magazine surveyed IT decision-makers, they discovered just 54% had a company-wide DR plan in place. More concerningly, 50% of those businesses test their provisions infrequently – once per year or less.

Why are businesses failing to test their “Plan B”? There are several potential reasons including a lack of available time and resources for testing or a lack of political interest in DR. Other businesses may avoid testing so they do not have to acknowledge failures – and the cost of fixing them.

In all these instances, disaster recovery is heavily reliant on manual processes. This makes them slow, error-prone and completely reactive. Given that DR is often invoked to reverse errors caused by human error, relying on processes that may further compound the issue is ill-advised.

In the age of data-driven operations, DR must become smarter, faster and more proactive. And this is where Data Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can help to build a Plan B that works.

A fail-over mechanism is essential

Traditionally, effective disaster recovery relies on a co-located secondary data centre that takes over in the event of a failure at the primary site. This is a significant administrative and cost overhead – one that is beyond the budget of most small and medium-class organisations.

With the advent of cloud resources, this function can now be outsourced to a Data Recovery as-a-service provider. This means that virtually any business can begin implementing – and testing – a proper Plan B.

Not only can they scale their DR provisions at will, but they also have the option of applying intelligent technologies to managing fail-over and recovery processes. Using automation will limit the potential for human error throughout the recovery process and accelerate many low-level admin tasks. This will free up staff to focus on other activities that help restore operations.

Seek professional help

There is a multitude of potential DRaaS services to choose from – but not all are the same. To avoid problems with your Plan B, consider:

  • Scaling – do we need to specify capacity requirements in advance? Are we likely to over-or under-provision?
  • Security – will our security provisions be replicated in the cloud, or are we leaving data potentially exposed?
  • Complexity – as our on-premise IT complexity increases, will our DRaaS partner assist with replication into the cloud?
  • Egress – Adding data to the cloud is cheap, but what are the costs if we want to get it back, or to migrate to another service?

Answering these questions is vital to ensuring Plan B continues to deliver value now – and into the future. For more help and advice on avoiding DRaaS pitfalls, please get in touch.

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Making the business case for disaster recovery

Because of the relative rarity of a significant system outage, many SMEs have deliberately underinvested in their data protection provisions. Backup allows them to recover almost all of their systems and data (eventually), so why invest in a true disaster recovery solution?

Although most see this as a calculated risk, the impact of an outage can be devastating for a data-driven business. Here’s what you need to consider before trying to justify not investing in disaster recovery tools.

Reducing RPO windows

It is possible to recover most of your data from a traditional backup but:

  • The process is typically quite slow
  • Data changes significantly between backups – how much information can you afford to lose in that window?

It is entirely possible that relying on backups could cost your business 22 hours or more lost productivity.

A disaster recovery platform is specifically designed to reduce the recovery point objective (RPO – the amount of data your business can ‘afford’ to lose) to minutes or seconds. Cloud-based DR systems also allow you to create service tiers so that you can prioritise what is protected, the performance of the underlying infrastructure and how it is brought online in an emergency. This granular control ensures you can balance availability, performance and cost to meet your strategic recovery goals.

Affordable resilience

Modern disaster recovery platforms use the cloud to provide massive scalability without upfront hardware investment. You simply pay for the storage you use. There is no longer any need to invest in co-located data centres, duplicate hardware set-ups, licensing or the resources required to administer them.

Using cloud-based services allows you to avoid significant up-front capital investment – immediately answering one of the main arguments against deploying DR. It also ensures that your data is fully recoverable from anywhere in the world.

Built for the cloud

Backup and recovery tools are normally designed for use with on-premise systems. This becomes a serious shortcoming as your business adopts more cloud-based services.

DR tools are increasingly cloud-native, meaning that they can capture snapshots of data stored in hosted systems. Importantly, they can also restore data to other cloud platforms, offering a useful alternative if your on-premise data centre is out-of-action.

Improve your testing capabilities

Disaster recovery tools create a complete copy of your operating environment that is ready to be recovered at any moment. However, you can also use these DR copies for advanced testing and planning.

Say you want to assess the potential risks associated with a new software update. Rather than deploying into your live environment, you can use a DR copy. All of your tests are completely accurate and reliable because the copied system is identical to your production environment. Tests can be completed without any risk to operations.

To learn more about why your business can’t afford to not invest in disaster recovery tools – and what you stand to gain – please get in touch.

Continuous Backup and Recovery

Understanding continuous backup and recovery technologies

Continuous Backup and Recovery is designed to meet all of your data protection requirements in a single platform across your entire IT estate. The idea is to converge backup, disaster recovery and data mobility across on-premises and cloud systems.

Additionally, continuous backup and recovery tools should offer orchestration, automation and analytics to further simplify data protection.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

In the past, synchronous replication has been reserved for mission-critical workloads. Using Change Block Tracking (CBT) for near-synchronous replication, it is possible to back-up data in real-time without having to worry about backup windows and schedules.

CDP is always-on, operating at the hypervisor level and integrating with existing assets. You can benefit from the technology immediately without costly hardware upgrades or replacements.

Track changes with Journaling

By tracking and recording every single change in your application or server, the journal offers finely detailed recovery options. Every five seconds, the journal is updated, recording these changes as checkpoints.

Any of these checkpoints can be used as a recovery point, helping to significantly reduce RPO and potential data loss. A journal is created for all of your virtual machines – even when you have thousands, giving you total control of your production system and backups.

Each journal is also updated with a checkpoint stamp every few seconds. Checkpoints offer another potential recovery point for files, VMs, applications and more

Long-Term Retention

Checkpoints in the journal are available for up to 30 days – beyond that, your CDP solution will need to offer long-term repositories (LTR). The LTR and replicated files are located on secondary storage – often a low-cost cloud repository.

LTR can be configured to maintain files and journals for up to seven years – or even longer if required.

Multi-VM Application Consistency

Complex, enterprise-grade applications typically run across multiple virtual machines. In order to ensure consistent, accurate data at the point of restore, you must be able to select a consistent checkpoint across them all. In this way, you guarantee application consistency because all VMs are restored as a single entity back to the exact same point in time

Orchestration and Automation

The complexity of your operating environment is reflected in the complexity of your backup processes. Consolidating continuous backup and recovery into a single platform will immediately help to simplify operations. However, a leading-edge tool will also include orchestration and administration functionality too.

By configuring the setting in advance, the recovery process – and intermediate stages – can be triggered with a few mouse clicks. Much of the procedure will then complete automatically so the IT team can focus on other activities in the middle of a data centre crisis.

Analytics

Understanding how your backup and recovery processes are performing is more than a pass/fail indicator. Continuous backup and recovery tools should provide you with detailed analytics so you can see trends, anomalies and issues without having to dig through event logs and reports. Using these analytics you should be able to better model “what if” scenarios for planning future backup infrastructure requirements. And to spot opportunities for improvement.

Taking the next step

The value of your data continues to increase – data loss is no longer tolerable or acceptable. To avoid problems, your business should be looking at implementing a continuous backup and recovery toolkit immediately.

To learn more about your options – and our preferred continuous backup and recovery platform, Veeam – please get in touch.