Outsourced Disaster Recovery

By Rich Schwerin

New offering extends Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture to companies of all sizes.

To stay in business today, a company needs to maintain operations during and after a disaster. Many enterprises already rely on Oracle technology, such as Oracle Data Guard, to build systems that recover quickly from failure while protecting critical data. "Prior to implementing Oracle9i Real Application Clusters [RAC] and Oracle Data Guard, recovery from failures took between two and three days," says David Wenner, manager of information systems at Schachter & Namdar, one of the world's most prominent diamond manufacturers. "During this time, we could not process any business transactions, which often cost us up to US$1 million a day in lost revenue."

Now, a new outsourcing program from Oracle, called Oracle Disaster Recovery Outsourcing, can help companies of all sizes establish and manage safe and secure disaster recovery operations. In the event of a disaster, Oracle will recover and activate production data and applications in as little as two hours at Oracle's secondary site. It's the first service of its kind to combine application and data synchronization and implement Maximum Availability Architecture, providing consistent service levels at both primary and secondary sites.

The service, based on Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture, is available to Oracle E-Business Suite Outsourcing customers, and Oracle plans to extend the service to all customers within the next year.

High Cost of Downtime

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Oracle launched the outsourcing program due, in part, to the high cost of system downtime.

Just how much does this downtime cost? An independent study from Strategic Research found that, depending on the industry, the average hourly cost of such interruptions can be significant. For example, for a retail brokerage, an hour of downtime equals a loss (on average) of US$6.5 million; for an airline reservation center, the average loss for an hour of interruption is US$90,000.

Oracle's High-Availability Solutions

Oracle Data Guard, a built-in feature of Oracle9i Database Enterprise Edition, creates, maintains, manages, and monitors one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and corruptions.

Data Guard maintains these standby databases as transactionally consistent copies of the production database, so if the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or unplanned outage, Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, minimizing downtime and preventing any data loss.

"Oracle Data Guard is simply the best disaster-recovery and data-protection technology in the industry," says Juan Loaiza, vice president of Oracle's System Technology Group. "It is unmatched in its ability to provide complete data protection while using the least amount of network resources. Add to that the ability to run queries on the standby, and no other solution comes close. When combined with Oracle9i RAC to ensure rapid recovery from system failures, Data Guard provides the foundation for an infrastructure that can tolerate any failure."

Besides Data Guard, Oracle offers a suite of integrated high-availability solutions, available natively with Oracle Database. These include Oracle9i RAC for protection from system-level failures and for providing application scalability, Recovery Manager (RMAN) for managing backups and ensuring database recoverability, and Flashback Query and LogMiner for detection of and protection from human error, plus dynamic reconfiguration and online redefinition for implementing system changes and data changes without ever needing to shut down the database.