Rev Up Database Recovery at 35 TB/Hour+ with Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

August 12, 2021 | 3 minute read
Tim Chien
Senior Director of Product Management
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Five years ago, our product team introduced Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance to address key data protection issues still plaguing modern-day enterprise databases using legacy generic backup solutions available on the market. Long backup windows, unverifiable backup data quality, and slow recovery performance continue to be major customer pain points, ultimately impacting data protection SLAs for their most business critical assets.

These problems have only become magnified in the present day world of ransomware attacks across all industries and sectors. Simply put, ransoms are paid to regain access to critical data because the backup is itself attacked, incomplete, or takes too long to fully recover. And while a one-time ransom payment may sound like the best course of action versus a continued business outage, in many cases decryption methods that are provided are unsuccessful, leaving businesses again with the prospect of spending days or longer recovering data, if even possible.

Slow recovery operations are more fundamental than just 'hardware limitations'. Continually adding more powerful media servers and backup devices to handle primary production infrastructure growth increases complexity of the backup infrastructure. Configuring and maintaining database client software required for the backup infrastructure only adds to the problem. It is neither practically sound nor economically viable, resulting in the proverbial IT sprawl without tackling the core challenge of handling database growth.

Recovery Appliance fundamentally changes the paradigm of legacy data protection to focus on what matters - recovery – with a purpose-built database-centric solution focused on two key objectives:

  • Reducing Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) down to sub-second / zero via real-time data protection (see #4 in this post)
  • Reducing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) through unique virtual full restore technology (see #2 in this post), coupled with high-speed 4 x 25Gb backup/restore network connectivity.

To put this in perspective:

  • A storage replication product offering ‘real-time protection’ but with slow restore performance does not solve the downtime problem. 
  • A copy data management product offering ‘fast recovery' is targeted for test/dev cloning on secondary storage, not real-time protection nor 'fast restore' to production in event of disaster or outage.

With Recovery Appliance, there is no compromise: 24x7 real-time protection plus fast production recovery. As a fully scale-out, high-performance platform, Recovery Appliance radically simplifies the IT landscape, where every database instantly gains real-time protection.

Recently, a large financial services Oracle customer requested a performance proof of concept engagement to meet 10 TB/hour restore of a 120 TB database using the Recovery Appliance. We rose to the challenge, leveraging:

  • Exadata X8-2 HC Full Rack to host the database, configured as an 8-node Real Application Cluster (RAC) with 10Gb restore connectivity per node (80 Gb)
  • Recovery Appliance X8 with 9 storage servers and 4 x 25 Gb (100 Gb bonded) connectivity

With this setup out-of-the-box:

  • An overall restore performance of 35 TB/hour was achieved, which was 3-4X faster than the customer's restore requirement. 
  • The system effectively utilized the available 100Gb restore bandwidth without requiring any special tuning or upgrades

As they say, a picture is a worth a thousand words - the below restore time and performance charts best illustrate the results. The 120 TB database was restored in just under 3.5 hours with performance peaking at 46 TB/hour.

For more details on this performance study, see this technical brief. Check out more technical proof points in our Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) papers and presentations.

And take a look at our compilation of Recovery Appliance product resources, which includes customer case studies with business and technical benefits achieved.

Tim Chien

Senior Director of Product Management

Tim Chien is Senior Director of Product Management with Oracle's High Availability and Storage Management Group, focusing on Backup and Recovery, including Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, Recovery Manager (RMAN), and Flashback Technologies. His 20+ years of product management and marketing experience includes both application server and database products, and he has presented at numerous Oracle and industry conferences around the world. Tim received his bachelors and masters in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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