Top 5 Tips for Disaster Recovery Planning

 In this modern era of “always-on” business, prolonged downtime is not acceptable.  It is the need of the generation to keep small or large businesses running all the time. A steady rise in data security attacks and continuously changing IT landscape have revolutionised the disaster recovery market in recent years. According to stats, 86% of companies experienced system downtime in the last 12 months.  A report says, 90% of businesses losing data due to disaster are forced to shut down within two years. To most of the organisations, reliance on IT simply means not operating when the system went down. Such companies need to have a disaster recovery solution in place to make sure the businesses operate even after a disaster.

Indeed, IT disasters are unpredictable, but recovery needs to be planned, predictable and controlled. A recovery plan describes the scenarios to resume work as soon as possible and reduces interruptions in the aftermath of a disaster. It enables sufficient IT recovery and the prevention of data loss. A recovery plan should be a thoroughly detailed report that includes all the ins and outs of the policy right from emergency contacts to succession planning. Additionally, the dynamic nature of IT requires constant review and updates of the process and plan. It must be a part of everyday operations.

Here are a few essential keys to consider while selecting a disaster recovery plan.

1. Know Your Threats and Prioritize Them

The first stage of developing an effective DR plan is to understand the most severe threats to your IT infrastructure and their impact on everyday operations and long-run business success. Identifying risks like system failure, staff error, fire or power loss can help to put the solution in place and determine the course of action needed for recovery.

Large-scale disasters like storm require careful planning and execution. A significant concern is business continuity when a storm strikes and backup data storage failure. To address these issues, it is mandatory to make a list of potential disasters and prioritizing them depending on their occurrence. Post-disaster ranking determines the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for every service.

Along with RTOs, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) need to be considered in the recovery plan. In other words, a volume of data a company is prepared to lose is RPO. Data Backup frequently will help you to meet your RPO.

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Multi -Tenant Databases

 Architecture where a single instance of software can server multiple clients can be termed as “Multi-Tenant”, and every single client known as “Tenant”. Today, this can be easily understood with the help of cloud computing, where user can run single instance application on single instance of database and accommodate the request of multiple web users. In such case data and information of each tenant or client is isolate from other. Oracle makes use of multi-tenancy architecture and provide the feature called “Pluggable Database” in its Oracle 12c release. This option multi-tenant database allow single database known as container database or CDB to host multiple databases known as pluggable database or PDB.

Consolidation, we know is the option in IT industry that almost every organization is looking at to reduce the IT cost. This consolidation has been worked upon and implemented at every layer of IT infrastructure. It can be network consolidations, web server consolidations etc. while consolidating care has promptly be taken that it won’t hamper functions of consolidated components. Oracle too, has come with up this option of consolidating multiple database into a single container database. This option of multitenant architecture fully compliments with other Oracle Technologies like Oracle RAC, Streams, and Dataguard. That means one can easily use the features of Oracle high availability in this architecture without any changes and modifications. Following lets have glance at offerings of this new architecture:

1. Oracle has beautifully taken care of basic requirement of database and its architecture. Each pluggable database gets its own memory and set of its background processes, as in case of single traditional database. Unlike old architecture multi-tenant architecture of database allows you run as many pluggable database as you can, which provides the benefit of schema-based consolidation.
   
   
2. Most of the time we come across situation where we need replica of our database. The requirement can testing environment, development environment or any other. DBA’s knows the overheads it has. With this new feature we can easily clone the database within seconds, with simple SQL statements. The next one, the copy or clone can be created within same container database or between the various containers. Also the pluggable databases can be unplugged from one container database to another.
   
   
3. The feature that is really stunning about the Oracle 12c multi-tenant architecture. We are very well aware of the patching and upgrading processes of the software and database. They are not only time consuming, but need to look upon various dependencies and compatibilities at various level like OS, applications, etc. With pluggable databases, you simply need to unplug and plug the database to multi-tenant container database of different Oracle Version. Upgrading/Patching container database will automatically upgrade/patch the pluggable database. Not to revise again that it cost effective and time saving tasks we ever simply had it before.

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