Imagine you lose access to your business-critical data and applications; how would that affect your operations on any given day? How much would the lost productivity and missed business opportunities cost you and your company? Well, if I had to guess, probably hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars when you lose access to your infrastructure. And even if there aren’t any immediate financial impacts, you’re still damaging your brand and reputation which can cause a whole slew of other problems. That’s why you need to choose a cloud provider that ensures the highest availability for your services. And since we’re the only ones to offer end-to-end SLAs covering performance, manageability and availability of services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the right choice.
With Oracle, your cloud workloads are in continual operation with our commitment to uptime and connectivity. Plus, our manageability SLAs give you the confidence that you’ll always be able to manage, monitor, and modify your cloud resources. And it’s not only important that your resources are accessible and manageable but it’s also important that they provide consistently high performance. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) networks, in our datacenters, between availability domains, and between regions are all optimized for performance. Oracle doesn’t over subscribe network resources, so you experience a low-latency, high throughput network that provides consistent and predictable performance. So, no matter the size or criticality of your workload, Oracle has you covered to with our commitment to providing you with high availability, high and consistent performance, and manageability of your cloud resources.
One of the newest updates to Oracle’s Service Level Objectives for PaaS and IaaS Public Cloud Services is 99.995% uptime for Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure (ADB-D) with Autonomous Data Guard (AuDG) (this SLA doesn’t apply to ADB-D Cloud@Customer which has a 99.95% SLO). This means maximum of a little over 2 minutes of downtime monthly and ~26 minutes for the entire year! And with Autonomous Database, unlike other cloud provider services, there are No Ridiculous Exclusions (NRX) with our SLAs. Thus, this total SLA time includes not only unplanned downtime, such as hardware failures and network outages, but also any planned downtime during preventive maintenance, software upgrade, patches, and so on. Plus, with ADB-D, we’ve implemented Transparent Application Continuity (TAC) which allows you to build ‘Always-On’ applications. TAC recovers in-flight database sessions following recoverable outages resulting in sessions experiencing only slightly delayed executions instead of having connections dropped mid-transaction and having to re-connect and restart transactions. All these technologies combined gives you the highest SLA in the world for any data management solution. So regardless of your unplanned outages and planned maintenance, we have you covered to provide you the best user experience possible.
Autonomous Data Guard
How is ADB-D able to guarantee such high availability? Well, we’re getting to the 99.995% SLA by implementing Autonomous Data Guard, but what is it? Autonomous Data Guard on ADB-D is a feature that leverages all the amazing capabilities of Active Data Guard and combines them with the advanced automation and self-management capabilities of the Autonomous Database. AuDG automatically configures your standby, makes it available as an Active Data Guard Standby, and configures and manages your entire Fast Start Failover environment. All you need to do is assign which Exadata Cloud Infrastructure you want your standby built on, and all that complexity of setting up Active Data Guard, provisioning your Observer, and configuring Fast-Start Failover is now reduced to a couple of clicks. For more information on Autonomous Data Guard and how it’s implemented with Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure (ADB-D), click here.
With Autonomous Database Dedicated configured with AuDG running your HA, DR, and BCP environments, you’re ready for anything: fires, hurricanes, or even failure with the container database itself, you name it. When your primary database goes down and you have Automatic Failover enabled, failover to your standby gets trigged with no human intervention and your Autonomous Database automatically fails over to the standby with zero data loss in about 30 seconds. Alternatively, you also have the option to manually failover if you would like more control over when you failover your databases by disabling the automatic failover capability built into Autonomous Data Guard.
Besides the low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and non-existent Recovery Point Objective (RPO), ADB-D with AuDG can take advantage of ADB’s Autoscaling capability to open the door on even more cost optimization and savings. Autoscaling enables you to automatically adjust the number of CPU cores as load demand fluctuates, allowing the system to use cores more efficiently. AuDG allows you to access your standby database and offload analytics queries and other “supporting” jobs from your primary database to the standby thereby lowering your primary database’s peak CPU demand. This, in turn, can lower your primary CPU baseline and lead to even more cost optimization as that lower primary baseline CPU count also lowers your standby baseline CPU needs.
Bring Your Own License
And what’s great about Autonomous Database Dedicated (ADB-D), is that you can take advantage of existing investments in Oracle on-premises licenses by bringing your on-premise licenses to the cloud (BYOL). Both Enterprise Edition as well as Standard Edition licenses are eligible for our BYOL program. With BYOL to the Oracle Database Cloud, you’re able to significantly lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your entire Oracle estate and maximize the value of your existing Oracle investments. Plus, you can get twice the value of your already-budgeted support dollars with Oracle Support Rewards. Basically, the more you use OCI, the more you save, with customers earning up to 33% back on every dollar spent, reducing your tech software license support bill, even down to zero!
Get Started Today
So, what are you waiting for? See first-hand how to keep your critical production databases available to mission critical applications despite failures, disasters, human error, or data corruption with Autonomous Database Dedicated and Autonomous Data Guard. Make sure you’re not one of these companies losing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to downtime, both planned and unplanned. Try out ADB-D yourself with Oracle LiveLabs, a way for you to get hands-on experience and build up your technical skills. And once you feel ready to explore Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, get unlimited services like Autonomous Database with the Always Free Tier.