Oracle databases are used by 98% of Fortune 500 companies and form the backbone of mission-critical applications and business operations. If the availability of an Oracle database has been compromised due to a disaster or logical failure, then performance is interrupted, data is potentially lost, the corporate image is tarnished, and the stock price is potentially devalued.
Protection Issues for Oracle Database Servers
Securing Oracle Database Servers is critical for organizations of all sizes, and securing them is becoming increasingly complex with a large number of data changes being written on an ongoing basis inside large databases, sometimes measured in terabytes. Many different BC/DR technologies can be used to protect Oracle database servers, common examples are storage-based replication, log shipping, or database mirroring applications. Each of these different technologies introduces the following risks for recovering Oracle Database Servers:
- Multiple solutions require separate skill sets that rely on individual knowledge of how to restore Oracle database servers, which is also challenging.
- Log shipping and database mirroring applications require an administrator to manage and maintain protection, in addition to an existing managed disaster recovery plan
- Lack of availability or integration into a virtualized environment managed by Oracle Database increases operational complexity
- Manual recovery operations result in Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) based on the agility and knowledge of employees
- Recovery testing is complex, time-consuming, and often requires production downtime, making testing highly specialized and infrequent.
- Constant maintenance may be required to maintain protection, leading to the risk of temporary windows without protection and increasing the cost of management overhead.
When securing Oracle Database Servers, applications that use databases are often forgotten or not included in the same protection technology or recovery plan. This leads to complications in the recovery process, a lack of availability in the protection state of the entire application stack, such as SAP, and can render disaster recovery testing incomplete because the entire stack is not tested together, resulting in increased risk and not being able to be restored in a timely and efficient manner.
Benefits of Securing Oracle Database Servers with Zerto Virtual Replication
Zerto Virtual Replication solves all the problems of protecting Oracle database servers running in virtualized environments, allowing you to:
- Simple centralized BC/DR management inside the hypervisor across all protected virtual machines using a sequential management interface and a single skill set that requires no database administrator knowledge
- No production changes required to configure protection for Oracle servers
- Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) in seconds, without sacrificing performance
- Log-based protection that preserves the accuracy of the order in which all writes are written on all disks within the Oracle VM, including databases and log files
- Virtual Machine-Level Integration, KPIs, Reporting, and Protection Status Alerts
- Multi-VM sequential application recovery for multi-tier Oracle-based applications such as SAP
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for minutes to previous timescales, up to increment every few seconds, up to 14 days ago
- Continuous disaster recovery testing of Oracle database servers and application servers to fully validate the business recovery process within minutes
- Protect physical or virtual Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) on virtual disks or in a pre-provisioned RDM at the target site
- Temporary initial replication database saves 50% of replication traffic without further modification
- The Remote Backup feature moves backup operations to the DR site, and allows daily, weekly, and monthly archiving of backup data.
Resume
Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Zerto to protect their Oracle database servers, as this simplifies BC/DR while providing enterprise-class protection and delivering the necessary SLAs to protect critical business systems such as Oracle Database Servers.