Re: Disaster Recovery with Oracle

Well... "Tom" above should'nt be spamming the dbForums with sales pitches. You guys/gals have every right to grouse about it. Shame on him (nice effort, but bad move IMHO).

That said, I use these products. Two of them, as a matter of fact. One in one building backing up production systems, and another mirrored replica of the first one in a separate building. You can send me email at robert.budd_at_mywork.com Just change the "mywork" part to "hp" if you'd like to chat more about it.

Do they work? Yes. What do they cost? Well factoring in the hardware, licensing, support, etc, etc... about 50k for the pair. Much better price than full blown automatic tape libraries and dedicated backup server software. Having purchased both in the past, I will confirm this.

Have I been burned by bad tapes during restore in the past? Yes, even though I routinely validated those backups. Do these devices have that same problem? Not really. Not only do you have a nice RAID array holding your backup data, but you've got a block copy of it residing in a remote location as well. Sprinklers deploy in your datacenter? (why the hell do you have H20 in your computer rooms anyway?), fine. Change your DNS to point to the other server and life presses on-- nothing lost. Your databases may not have survived, but your backups did. You've got bigger problems to worry about anyway for business continuity, but at least you've got backups to work with once someone gets some hardware up and running for you to restore to. After years of watching the nice lady with the lock vault coming and going from datacenters with tapes being shuffled offsite, it's nice to have a modern solution that is less "hands on".

They're RMAN based, endorsed by Oracle, they notify the living bezeesus out of you if you let them (paging/email), and they can also be configured to do whatever the heck you want as far as backup/recovery. They are configurable as much as you want-- the newbie DBA can use them out of the box, and the seasoned veteran DBA can tweak them to his/her liking. They quietly do their job, stay out of my hair, and let me concentrate on other tasks besides babysitting/worrying about backup/recovery.

Continue to grouse about it if you want, just thought I'd throw in my two cents from the field. These appliances are worth a look, and not a waste of your time. Am I the worlds greatest DBA? No. Just a DBWB (database worker bee) passing on a nugget of info.

Robert Budd

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