Evergy Energizes Oracle Database Backup and Recovery

October 5, 2021 | 4 minute read
Brian Gruttadauria
Senior Director, Product Marketing
Marco Calmasini
Sr. Principal Product Manager
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Evergy is a leading electric company based in Missouri, serving more than 1.6 million residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Missouri and Kansas. They have a generating capacity of 16,000 megawatts of electricity from over 40 power plants. As any energy utility company, Evergy is required by government regulations to ensure its data is always available and rapidly recoverable in case of a ransomware attack. 

Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance Overcomes Evergy’s Challenges

In 2019, Nazrul Islam, Manager of Database Services at Evergy, started a project to rearchitect their backup and recover solution, which fell short of meeting business needs. The project focused on Evergy’s 500+ Oracle databases that ranged from a few gigabytes to well over 50 terabytes in size. The goal was to meet the corporate requirement to maintain business operations 24 hours a day, every day of the year. There were a wide range of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) based on an assessment of how critical each workload was to the business.

Before the project started, Evergy’s backup strategy was based on legacy hardware and in-house developed scripts that created a full backup every week and incremental backups for the remaining weekdays with the results stored on general purpose storage appliances. This approach resulted in the following pain points:

  • Poor backup performance forced weekly full backups to take over 24 hours to complete, negatively impacting production application performance
  • Challenging backup monitoring and backup storage space management that created a lack of confidence on backup status
  • Tedious and cumbersome management of archived redo log backups and maintenance that diverted Database Administrators’ time away from other crucial tasks
  • Unknown backup data integrity since backups were not regularly tested for recoverability, increasing risk of failure during recovery operations
  • Refreshing of development and testing environments using export/import procedures had a turnaround time of 2+ days

Nazrul recalls those struggles: “Backup of a 15TB Database took over 2 days and restore took even longer, making it impossible to perform recovery tests or to refresh test and development environments in a reasonable time. We also tested a 3rd party copy data management solution, but the backup performance did not meet our needs.”

Evergy’s challenge in modernizing their backup and recovery strategy is not unique, with many customers around the world facing the same issues. Over the last 20 years, Oracle has worked with leading customers around the world to develop robust best practices and architecture blueprints to protect and secure their Oracle databases. Solutions developed by the Maximum Availability Architecture team help organizations minimize the disruptions to their business from unplanned downtime caused by equipment failures, power outages, human errors, or malicious activities. Oracle’s Recovery Appliance is a key component of these Maximum Availability Architecture solutions.

Solution Design in Cooperation with Oracle

After a Proof of Concept (POC) with Oracle aimed at addressing their backup and recovery issues, Evergy decided to move all their Oracle Database backups, a significant part of their total daily corporate backup volume, to the Recovery Appliance. The new architecture introduced two Recovery Appliances: one at the main data center, and one at the disaster recovery (DR) location. This allowed the Evergy to switch their backup workflows to a true incremental-forever strategy, while enabling Real Time Redo Transport for continuous data protection allowed them to achieve sub-second RPO and eliminated the need for archived redo log backups.

With Recovery Appliance, Evergy gained the following advantages:

  • Reduced the impact of backups on database servers by eliminating full, and archive log backups as well as validation tasks
  • Eliminated third-party data protection software agents that were impacting performance of the production environment and business-critical workloads
  • Reduced the backup window of a 50 TB production database to less than one hour, where previously it took over 2 days to complete with a legacy backup solution.
  • Simplified Backup Management with automated and standardized policies, freeing up Database Administrators time for more productive tasks.
  • Improved deduplication ratio by 10x, going from 15:1 on the legacy solution to 150:1 with Recovery Appliance
  • Shortened the refresh time of the Development and Test environment from 2+ days to only 15 minutes

Evergy was also in the process of migrating some Oracle Databases (around 20TB in size) running on IBM Power systems running AIX servers in remote data centers to an Exadata in the main data center. Evergy took advantage of Recovery Appliance’s Cross-platform Migration Toolkit to convert the data from IBM format (big-endian) to Exadata format (little-endian) during the migration process, allowing them to successfully complete database migrations with minimal downtime despite limited network bandwidth and considerable data volumes.

Nazrul attests to his experience and looks forward to the future: “I am very relieved we can count on Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. We spent so much time with refresh tasks, now the DBA team’s productivity has improved significantly, we have the protection of our Oracle databases under control at any time through Enterprise Manager and the confidence that, in case we need an urgent restore, we will be able to perform it very quickly and up to the latest transaction. We are looking forward to the Recovery Appliance’s new Backup Anywhere feature. It gives us the first highly available database-aware protection solution, ensuring the validity and consistency of the database at all times in any location.”

See the Recovery Appliance X9M announcement blog for details on the latest release and capabilities.

 

 

 

 

Brian Gruttadauria

Senior Director, Product Marketing

Brian leads marketing for Oracle’s Exadata database systems and storage portfolio including the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance and ZFS Storage array. He is responsible for developing and evangelizing Oracle’s cloud infrastructure strategy globally. Prior to joining Oracle, Brian was the VP of enterprise architecture at Lenovo where he lead his team in the design and advanced execution of Lenovo’s first Teir-1 server and storage portfolio. Brian is also an 18-year veteran of the EMC. He holds 20+ patents across several technologies and was the GM of the Lenovo/EMC joint venture which was a 100M a year business.

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Nazrul Islam

Marco Calmasini

Sr. Principal Product Manager

Marco Calmasini is a Senior Principal Product Manager within the Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Solutions team, working on the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, Oracle Secure Backup, and Database Backup Cloud Service. Marco has presented at many technical conferences for Oracle and external partners including Oracle CloudWorld and contributes to a monthly webinar on data protection for the Oracle Database.

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