Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service, is Oracle’s strategic database-integrated recovery solution, based on Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance technology, for Oracle Managed Databases in OCI, Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. The Recovery Service offers modern cybersecurity protection and resiliency capabilities and is strongly recommended for all Oracle Managed Databases.
In this blog, we will compare the key advantages of database backups to Autonomous Recovery Service with traditional Object Storage. We will also discuss the additional advantages of the premium Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service for mission-critical databases.
The Autonomous Recovery Service provides the following unique advantages over Object Storage backups while maintaining the same price point:
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Achieve Faster Backups with Less Database Overhead – Recovery Service eliminates the weekly full backup and uses an offloaded incremental forever backup paradigm, so database CPU, memory, and I/O overhead are reduced along with the backup window. Your valuable database resources can now be more focused on business needs rather than backup tasks.
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Be Confident in Reliable Recovery – Recovery Service validates all backups for data anomalies that can impact recovery operations. Combining this validation process with immutability and enforced encryption, your data is safe, unalterable by anyone in the customer tenancy, and always ready for recovery in case of a ransomware attack. Recovery is also predictably fast since Recovery Service optimizes each incremental backup into a virtual full backup, eliminating the need to process extra data from a full backup produced days ago.
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Get Deeper Insights into your Database Protection – Recovery Service provides a centralized data protection dashboard and addresses key questions about the state of your database backups. Are my backups healthy? How long has it been since my last backup? How far back can I recover? How much backup space is used for specific databases? Which databases belong to the same protection policy, based on their business requirements?
Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service builds on the above capabilities by adding the unique capability of real-time database protection:
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Zero Data Loss for all Database Backups – Real-time protection of the database enhances recovery operations to within less than a second of when an outage or ransomware attack occurred. If a ransomware attack happens, you know you are protected right up to the moment before the attack instead of having to recover to the last scheduled backup, which could have been hours ago.
Recovery Service Cost Compared to Object Storage
As highlighted above, the Recovery Service offers significantly better backup and recovery capabilities compared to Object Storage, while maintaining the same price point as Object Storage backups. When Object Storage is selected as a destination in the automatic backup configuration, two services are triggered: the Database Backup Cloud Service (DBBCS) and Object Storage. The Database Backup Cloud Service is the software component of the backup solution, and the Object Storage is the physical storage where the backups are stored. Using the information in the OCI Cost Estimator, the sum of these two parts, shown on the left in Figure 1, is currently $0.0306/GB/Month. The Autonomous Recovery Service price, as shown in the middle of Figure 1, is exactly the same, $0.0306/vGB/Month. The Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service displayed on the right of Figure 1 provides real-time database protection and is priced at a 30% premium at $0.0400/vGB/Month.
The Recovery Service uses a virtualized GB (vGB) for consumption calculations, which is the sum of the storage consumption that would be used by weekly full backups, daily incremental backups, and archived redo log backups during a calendar month. This allows you to use traditional storage calculations to determine the cost as you would with Object Storage, while gaining the ability to recover from a virtual full backup on any desired day.
Figure1 – Recovery Service vs Object Storage price comparison
Customers can easily switch between Autonomous Recovery Service and Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service on a per-database basis by simply selecting the “Real-time data protection” option checkbox (Figure 2), allowing complete flexibility to choose what is best for your recovery requirements and budget. Customers can choose the Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service for the most mission-critical databases within their organization that cannot tolerate data loss, while less-critical databases can leverage Autonomous Recovery Service.
Ease of Object Storage Migration to the Recovery Service
Current Object Storage customers can seamlessly transition their backups to the Recovery Service. Before using the Recovery Service, customers perform a one-time setup checklist on the tenancy to establish permissions and enable secure communication between the database and the Recovery Service (Autonomous Recovery Service Checklist). Once this checklist is complete, you simply change the “Backup Destination” configured for automatic backups from Object Storage to Autonomous Recovery Service in the OCI Database management console, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – Automatic Backup Configuration
There is no database outage during this transition and no interruption to database protection. After the transition to Recovery Service, the previous backups stored in Object Storage using automatic backups are available for any recovery operation. No user intervention is required to select backups when performing recovery – simply select the point-in-time, and the cloud automation will choose the best backup to complete the recovery operation regardless of where the backup is stored. The previous backups in Object Storage will also be automatically cleaned up based on their retention, so you don’t have to perform any manual operations to delete any previous backups created with automatic scheduling.
Conclusion
For the same monetary investment, the Autonomous Recovery Service provides significant advantages over Object Storage backups with faster backups, reliable recovery, and deeper insights into database-level protection. For real-time protection, Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service can be easily enabled as needed for mission-critical databases. All Oracle Managed Databases running in OCI, Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS can now leverage Recovery Service for the best database recovery and protection capabilities available in the market. Make the switch to Recovery Service today!