Overview of Oracle's Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Oracle offers a number of well-integrated solutions available natively with the Oracle database, aimed at Data Protection & Disaster Recovery for enterprise data. These solutions, when used individually, or in combination with each other, or with complementary partner solutions that have been validated to be used with the Oracle database, offer businesses excellent flexibility in terms of the depth and breadth of the data protection and disaster recovery capabilities that the business wants to build into its IT infrastructure.

The data protection solutions available from Oracle are:

• Oracle Data Guard - Oracle Data Guard is the most effective and comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution available today for enterprise data. Available as a feature of the Enterprise Edition of the Oracle database, it is a software infrastructure that creates, maintains, manages and monitors one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and corruptions. It maintains these standby databases as transactionally consistent copies of the production database. If the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or an unplanned outage, Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, thus minimizing the downtime associated with the outage and enabling zero data loss. Click here for an overview of the functional components of Oracle Data Guard.

• Oracle Streams - Oracle Streams, which is an integrated feature of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, can be used to maintain one or more replica copies of a production database. These replicas need not all be identical - they can be subsets of a production database, or related by a well defined transformation. Streams also supports bi-directional replication with conflict detection and optional resolution. Its unique flexibility supports replication across large numbers of databases via any network topology. Although some business situations may require the flexibility offered by Streams, it is designed for integration of large distributed database environments, rather than pure disaster protection. Click here for further details on Oracle Streams.

• Oracle Advanced Replication - Oracle Advanced Replication enables the copying and maintenance of database objects in multiple databases that make up a distributed database system. Oracle Advanced Replication allows an application to update any replicas of a database, and have those changes automatically propagate to other databases, while ensuring global transactional consistency and data integrity. In the event of a disaster at one of the sites, the surviving databases will remain online. Click here for further details on Oracle Advanced Replication.

• Oracle Recovery Manager - Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) is Oracle's utility to manage the database backup, restore and recovery process. It creates and maintains backup policies, and catalogs all backup and recovery activities. The database can be kept online while RMAN is performing its backup. All data blocks can be analyzed for corruption during backup and restore, to prevent propagation of corrupt data through backups. Most importantly, Recovery Manager ensures all necessary data files are backed up, and the database is recoverable. Click here for further details on Oracle Recovery Manager.

• OSCP Validated Remote Mirroring - Through Oracle's Storage Compatibility Program (OSCP), Oracle partners have validated their remote mirroring solutions to be used with the Oracle database. Click here for details on the OSCP. The list of partners which have their solutions validated through OSCP is available here.
  

Considering the breadth of solutions that Oracle offers - either natively or through partner programs, one may wonder when it makes sense to use which technology for data protection and disaster recovery. Actually the choice is simple, as given in the following statement:

For data protection and disaster recovery, Oracle recommends that its customers use Oracle Data Guard. At the same time, customers should also backup their data consistently, and RMAN is the best solution for that purpose.

Why Oracle Data Guard? The reason is that it offers an unparalleled set of integrated data protection and disaster recovery benefits that cannot be found in any other solution:

1. Disaster recovery and high availability through transactionally consistent standby databases and automated switchover and failover capabilities

2. Complete data protection enabling zero data loss

3. Efficient utilization of system resources by allowing standby databases to be used for reporting and backup activities

4. Flexibility in data protection to balance between availability and performance

5. Automatic resynchronization of the standby databases with the primary database after network connectivity problems are resolved

6. Centralized and simple management

7. Integration with other Oracle HA/DR features like RAC and RMAN

8. No extra cost for this feature

Click here for further details on Data Guard.