Applying OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery in the real-world by Deloitte

November 29, 2022 | 4 minute read
Suraj Ramesh
Principal Product Manager
Tucker Thompson
Senior Consultant,Deloitte Consulting
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OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery (Full Stack DR) orchestrates the transition of infrastructure, platforms, and applications between OCI regions from anywhere around the globe with a single click.

Deloitte Consulting was one of our Full Stack DR early adopters. Deloitte uses Full Stack DR to automate disaster recovery of a highly critical internal application that runs in OCI. Full Stack DR replaced Deloitte’s existing manual rebuild DR strategy with an automated, much easier to maintain solution. In this blog post, Tucker Thompson from Deloitte has shared the features and benefits of using Full Stack DR.

A New Era in Availability

As organizations shift their workloads to the cloud, there is an innate breath of relief exhaled with the tossing asunder of traditional DR woes. With your processing no longer residing in a physical building attached to paperwork bearing your signature, gone is the fear of the 4 AM phone call about a fire, flood, tornado, busted HVAC, or a particularly sleep-deprived technician confusing rack location CX14 for XC14 and pulling the wrong cable during a peak workload.

While cloud technology is built on compounding layers of protective redundancies, Murphy’s Law and entropy tell us the worst can always still happen. That is why Oracle has gone beyond the robust layers of Availability Domains, Fault Domains, and general Maximum Availability Architecture to protect your cloud investment across Regional Layers.

With Full Stack DR, Oracle puts the power in clients hands to protect themselves from the worst of catastrophes. As the name implies, Full Stack DR provides a simple mechanism to protect and shift your entire stack from one physical region to another in a matter of minutes. This includes your compute instances, databases, block volumes, object storage, and more.

With Full Stack DR come compelling features that apply to Disaster Recovery and potential use-cases for other value-add functionalities. Here are some of our favorites in integrating Full Stack DR into our internal processes.

DR Protection group

Built-In Database Integration

Full Stack DR integrates directly with pre-existing and well-established Database DR Technologies. For example, Full Stack DR utilizes Data Guard under the hood to automatically perform switchover and failover operations for a primary/standby pair, even across regions. Full Stack DR allows you to manage and monitor these operations in parallel for every single database in your region from a single screen.

Run Command Plugin Integration

Full Stack DR allows you to use an  OCI Compute run command plugin feature to run commands and scripts on compute instances as part of a Full Stack DR activity. In doing so, you can take manual and time-consuming tasks that are part of a  DR plan and automate them directly into your Full Stack DR plan.

Movable Compute Instances

One of the most powerful concepts of Full Stack DR is it allows you to freely move compute instances across regions or availability domains. With minimal preparation work and without having to maintain a passive copy of the instance, compute instances can be moved at the click of a button. Full Stack DR also allows you to run commands on these instances before and after the move, opening an even more extensive list of automation possibilities.

Non-Movable Compute Instances

Who said you have to use Full Stack DR only for disasters? As part of a Full Stack DR plan, you can also have compute instances that remain in the primary region throughout the Full Stack DR activity. While this may seem counter-intuitive, you may have existing infrastructure that is region-specific and only used in certain circumstances. You can also use the run command plugin on these compute instances to run commands in different regions at different parts of the Full Stack DR activity. For example, you can start applications in the primary region VMs and stop applications in the secondary region VMs. This enables Full Stack DR to be used for active/passive DR scenarios.   

OCI Function integration

Last but by no means least, another one of our favorite features of Full Stack DR is its built-in integration with OCI Functions.Full Stack DR allows you to run a function in any region at any step of a Full Stack DR plan. By writing python code that integrates with OCI controls, you can tap into nearly limitless possibilities for controlling your cloud environment. If a niche feature or functionality is not built into Full Stack DR by default, you can  achieve your needs by integrating through an OCI Function.

Where Will the Possiblities Take You?

In the solution, our team applied Full Stack DR; we could take a highly critical internal application and ensure it was protected across regions. We previously did not have as robust of a DR plan, and losing the resources tied to a region would be detrimental to business operations. Our application involved various OCI components, including password vaults, compute instances, block storage, and MySQL database. By utilizing Full Stack DR, we could easily protect all of these resources that previously could only run from a specific OCI region and ensure these critical resources could be moved across regions at a moment’s notice.

As your organization looks at integrating Full Stack DR into your business model, think beyond the traditional Disaster Recovery scenarios. Protect yourself from the worst and open yourself to the possibilities by utilizing a centralized, region-independent cloud management engine. A true cloud isn’t tied to the ground; make sure your cloud resources can indeed operate from anywhere in the world.

Learn more or get hands on with service

Full Stack Disaster Recovery OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery

Full Stack Disaster Recovery Documentation

Full Stack Disaster Recovery LiveLabs

Suraj Ramesh

Principal Product Manager

Suraj Ramesh is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle. He is a member of the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability, and Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Product Management team, which is part of the Product Development of the core Oracle Database technologies.

In his current role, Suraj is responsible as a Product Manager for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Full Stack Disaster Recovery, General MAA focus, and Oracle DB Online Operations. Suraj is the founding Product Manager for OCI Full Stack DR which was launched in October 2022 at Oracle Cloud World.

Before moving into product management,  Suraj worked as a database administrator, cloud Architect, and IT manager. Suraj has completed various professional certifications in Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud and associate certifications in AWS and Azure.

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Tucker Thompson

Senior Consultant,Deloitte Consulting

Specialist in architecting, implementing, troubleshooting, and managing Complex Oracle environments and solutions. Experience ranges from supporting normal day-to-day database activity to architecting & delivering highly complex projects. Fields of expertise include a range of Oracle technologies, including Oracle Exadata Engineered Systems, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle GoldenGate Replication, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle RAC & Dataguard for High Availability, RMAN for Backup and Recovery, Transparent Data Encryption, and many others.

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