We added significant enhancements and accomplished some important milestones over the 2024 calendar year that make Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Full Stack Disaster Recovery (Full Stack DR) even easier to use and more cost effective. Let’s reflect on the following great things that have happened with Full Stack DR over the last twelve months:
If you’re not familiar with Full Stack DR, this disaster recovery service for OCI automates the manual steps that your IT staff normally spends hours performing during an unplanned outage, planned outage, or planned disaster recovery drill. Full Stack DR dramatically reduces the amount of time, effort and people needed to set up, maintain, validate, and accomplish recovery operations in a time of need.
Full Stack DR is a 100% cloud native service for OCI, designed to be flexible and adaptable enough to orchestrate end-to-end recovery for almost any conceivable application stack.
Our list of achievements would have been impossible without close collaboration with our customers over the past years. We’re grateful to have been invited to work with many of our customers and feel like we’re part of their team. The relationship with our customers and partners has been a real win for us! Our service continues to increase functionality and user experience, thanks in no small part to the close relationships we develop with our customers.
We also welcomed a few key customers to the stage with us at Oracle CloudWorld 2024 to explain how they utilize Full Stack DR. Cox Enterprises explained how they perform fully automated, end-to-end recovery for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle WebCenter with Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Integration, and a non-Oracle application called Vertex Tax Solutions. Athenahealth explained their fully automated recovery for Oracle PeopleSoft Financials, and Bionexo discussed their experience with our built-in support for automated recovery of OKE.
To read our customer success stories in full, see the following resources:
Full Stack DR became available in UK Government, EU Sovereign, Alloy, and Dedicated Regions (DRCC) OCI Realms during 2024. The onboarding process for United States Government and Department of Defense (DoD) Realms are still in process.
Full Stack DR became available on request for Alloy and DRCC. Each Alloy or DRCC is a single OCI region, so not all Alloy or Dedicated Regions have Full Stack DR deployed because Full Stack DR requires at least two regions before it can be deployed on either of these platforms.
OCI resources, such as compute, storage, and databases, are normally part of an inclusive application portfolio that need to be recovered in unison and can be included as members of Full Stack DR. However, recovery is sometimes run from the resource page for an individual Compute or database instance without realizing that the OCI resource is part of an entire recovery solution managed by Full Stack DR.
To solve this potential problem, both Autonomous Database and OCI Compute integrated Full Stack DR into their resource details page from the Oracle Cloud Console. Systems and database administrators can immediately recognize that the OCI resources they manage are part of a larger, more comprehensive disaster recovery plan that spans multiple OCI services.
We released two enhanced plan management features that customers have been eager to see for a while:
We also added the ability to add descriptive, planned pause steps to a DR Plan at any point in execution. These specialized steps pause plan execution, wait for your staff to perform a manual task of some sort, then resume the plan execution when you are ready.
Add Pause steps to flesh out a complete recovery plan that pauses at points in the recovery that you haven’t had time or resources to automate; slowly replace the pause steps over time with fully automated steps once you’ve figured out how accomplish the task with scripted automation or OCI Functions:
The resources hosted in Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) clusters are often only a small part of a larger, more complex business system or application stack. Our built-in intelligent module for OKE fully automates end-to-end recovery for OKE resources, such as deployments, pods, and persistent volumes. We introduced built-in support for OKE in a limited availability program late last calendar year.
Full Stack DR has an important advantage over other Kubernetes disaster recovery solutions because it orchestrates recovery for an entire applications infrastructure including storage, compute, network, and databases. Full Stack DR simplifies complete OKE recovery with a single workflow that begins with the click of a single button.
In September, we added built-in support for OCI Object Storage. Full Stack DR now automatically manages recovery of any replicated storage from all OCI storage services:
We introduced our ability to recover Oracle Databases hosted on Microsoft Azure using Oracle Data Guard. With the click of a single button, Full Stack DR can recover an entire application stack in OCI that includes Oracle Database@Azure in a single, fully automated, continuous workflow.
Full Stack DR added built-in support for four more Oracle Database services in OCI. Full Stack DR relies on Oracle Data Guard that you enable between availability domains or regions when you create a database. Add existing primary and standby databases to DR Protection Groups, and then click a single button to generate fully automated DR Plans in a few minutes.
For more information on integration with Database services, see the following resources:
Advance and future-proof your career by learning OCI for free with our expert-created training and globally recognized certification programs from Oracle University. Oracle University now includes Full Stack Disaster Recovery in the following OCI certification courses:
If you haven’t seen OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery in action yet, ask your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account team to set up a demonstration today. For more information, including documentation, pricing, tutorials, customer success stories, and hands-on labs, visit Full Stack Disaster Recovery.
I have been speicializing in high availability & disaster recovery since 1996. I also have a systems and storage administration/networking background and worked in various roles including 8 years in production systems administration and IT operations here at Oracle. I began my product management experience with Oracle VM in 2011, including a brief stint as software devloper in virtualization for 5 years, returning to product management in time to launch Full Stack DR October 2022.
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