CMiC optimizes disaster recovery for its next gen construction ERP with OCI File Storage service replication

This blog was developed in collaboration with CMiC. The author wants to thank Farhana Ahmad, Senior Manager, Content Marketing, PR and Social Media — CMiC, and Vince Di Piazza, Director of IT — CMiC.

CMiC is a leading provider of next-generation construction enterprise resource planning (ERP). Their integrated, and innovative software solutions, which are purpose-built for the construction industry, have helped them secure a strong foothold within the construction software space. From a solutions offering perspective, their main product categories are financials and project management. These solutions transform how construction firms optimize productivity, minimize risk and drive growth by planning and managing all financials, projects, resources, and content assets, all from a Single Database PlatformTM.

CMiC partners with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run the enterprise version of their construction ERP software, CONSTRUCT, as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. OCI’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) resources such as compute, storage, and database, are provisioned to meet these requirements. At its persistent storage layer, the CMiC platform uses OCI File Storage, OCI Object Storage, and Block Storage.

Disaster recovery goals and challenges

CMiC customers run business-critical services and require disaster recovery capabilities for the CMiC platform to protect against data center and regional outages, with the goal of having a seamless and cost-effective disaster recovery process. However, their disaster recovery process involved creating and managing self-managed replication infrastructure and scripts to maintain copies of data at the disaster recovery site.

For File Storage, the disaster recovery process involved mounting the source File Storage in the source region on dedicated IT-maintained rsync servers. These servers copied the source file system data to a destination file system located in the disaster recovery region. The cost involved not just infrastructure alone, but also human resources required to manage and support the replication infrastructure.

CMiC application integration with File Storage

File Storage service is a fully managed file storage service that can scale to exabytes without the need for storage provisioning in advance. The data is replicated in across fault domains and are encrypted at rest for added security. File Storage also provides snapshots, clones, and replication natively for additional data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.

CMiC application accesses File Storage through a mount on the application server instance. The construction blueprints and billing invoices are uploaded to File Storage through the application servers for processing and permeant storage. With File Storage, you can save application’s attachments and images because it has zero maintenance and unlimited storage capabilities.

The following graphic shows CMiC application integration with OCI File Storage in one customer environment:

File Storage snapshots

CMiC’s platform uses File Storage snapshots to protect from unexpected deletions or modification because of human errors. Daily snapshots are taken using the File storage policy-based snapshot feature. Policy-based snapshots automatically initiate snapshot creation and maintains the snapshots until the expiration time is reached. For backup and disaster recovery purposes, the snapshots created by policy-based snapshots are also configured to replicate using File Storage replication.

File Storage replication

The fully managed replication feature helps the disaster recovery process for CMiC. File Storage replication eliminates the need for CMiC to build, maintain, and support rsync servers to replicate storage across OCI regions.

Using OCI native replication for disaster recovery

CMiC integrates the OCI’s fully managed cross region replication solution to their disaster recovery process. OCI’s built-in native replication features handle all replication tasks required for data protection and disaster recovery, all without the need for any custom-built replication solutions. Customers’ production environments are protected using the following replication solutions for data base, File Storage, and Block Storage:

• Data Guard: The database is synchronously replicated using Oracle Data Guard
• File Storage replication: File systems and their snapshots are asynchronously replicated using native replication, with one hour replication intervals.
• Policy-based volume group backups: Application servers are backed up to remote region to restore in the event of a disaster.

Achievements

CMiC modernized their disaster recovery process by using OCI Storage and its native replication features. This process resulted in reduced costs and improved efficiency by eliminating the need for developing a self-managed replication infrastructure and related processes. In the end, this endeavor provides peace of mind for all parties involved. 

Try it for yourself

We encourage you to try OCI Storage services and its enterprise-grade features. To get started with architecting disaster recovery for your application, read the OCI disaster recovery architecture guide.

For more information on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and CMiC, see the following resources:

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Oracle Cloud Free Tier
• CMiC Solution