In an Oracle Database environment, Disaster Recovery (DR) is the architectural strategy used to prevent data loss and restore operations after a catastrophic failure. The current standard relies on Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA), utilizing RMAN for secure block-level backups and Oracle Active Data Guard for real-time, asynchronous or synchronous physical replication to a standby site, ensuring strict RPO and RTO compliance.
What is disaster recovery?
Companies increasingly rely on IT services for mission-critical operations, services, and even products, any downtime because of the disaster can negatively impact revenue streams, customer satisfaction, and the overall survival of the business.Increased awareness from large-scale disasters such as tsunami, earthquake, flood, and volcanic eruption has further forced companies to think in this direction. Setting a completely separate disaster recovery site can prevent the company from the downtime and help in disaster .The result is less downtime, improved business continuity, and increased competitiveness. So disaster recovery is the process to recover the Production on alternate site.Disaster recovery also help in case of Equipment malfunction, random power outages, theft, computer viruses, and human error. Infact it has been observed only 10% times of downtime can be attributed to natural disaster.Rest 90% are due to man made errors
What is disaster recovery in Oracle database?
Disaster recovery (DR) in Oracle refers to the strategy, processes, and tools used to restore business-critical applications, data, and IT infrastructure following a catastrophic site failure, such as natural disasters (floods, earthquakes) or major outages. It focuses on ensuring high availability and minimizing both downtime and data loss
Here are some of the terms we use in Disaster reccovery
What is Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
Business Continuity Planning is the processes and procedures that are carried out by an organisation to ensure that essential business functions continue to operate during and after a disaster . Business Continuity Plan heldp the organisations protect their mission critical services and give themselves their best chance of survival. This type of planning gives the power to re-establish services to a fully functional level as quickly and smoothly as possible. BCPs generally cover most or all of an organisation’s critical business processes and operations.
What is Disaster Recovery plan
This plan is more at the IT level and application wise. It outlines all the steps which need to be done in order for the application to work on alternate site
Each application will have seperate disaster recovery plan for it.
How is disaster recovery is achieved.
We need to protect the data for disaster recovery and copies it to alternate site
Here are most common strategies for data protection include:
1) backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals: We take backup at the production site and sent the tape to the alternate site
2) backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk, or made directly to off-site disk
3) Storage replication of data to an off-site location: Here the data is continously replicated to alternate site using Storage technology
4) Oracle dataguard: This is more specific to Oracle database
5) Oracle goldengate : This is more specific to database but not specific to oracle database
6) Using RSYNC on unix to copy to files from Production site to Alternate site
There are many product available in the market,I have just give few options
Apart from preparing the disaster recovery sites,Organization also give important to the production site and try to mitagate the Disaster recover solution
1) local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID, Oracle ASM mirroring
2) Minimize the power surges on delicate electronic equipment
3) UPS for uninterrupted operation
4) alarms and fire extinguishers to prevent fire
5) anti-virus software and other security measures to hackproof the data
Each strategies for data protection has its own advantage and disadvantage and Time to recover is different. SO organization need to decide about the recovery strategy based on the application. Some application will work good with tape backup,Some may require storage replication
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The target duration within which an application must be restored and operational after a disaster.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The maximum tolerable amount of data loss, measured in time, that an organization can accept before the disaster.
Key Oracle DR Solutions
Oracle provides various mechanisms to manage these objectives, ranging from manual backups to automated, full-stack orchestration.
- Oracle Data Guard: A primary technology for database DR that provides real-time physical replication. It keeps a standby database transactionally consistent with the primary database by continuously applying redo logs, enabling rapid failover and switchover.
- Full Stack Disaster Recovery (FSDR): An OCI service that manages the transition of entire application stacks—including infrastructure, platform, and application layers—between regions. It allows for “one-click” recovery, which simplifies complex workflows and reduces the need for manual intervention during crises.
- Backup and Restore: Utilizing tools like Recovery Manager (RMAN) to restore databases from backups after catastrophic loss, including control files and redo logs.
- Cross-Region Replication: Features such as Block Volume asynchronous replication allow data to be replicated across geographical regions, ensuring that data remains available even if an entire region experiences an outage.
Related Articles