Announcing Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance RA23: Next Generation Delivers Increased Capacity, Performance, Cyber Resiliency

We are very excited to announce the availability of the next generation Recovery Appliance RA23! This latest release delivers increased capacity and performance, with upcoming features for improving cyber resiliency and storage efficiency.

We will cover the RA23 product updates in two blogs. In part 1, we will provide an overview of key updates and in part 2, drill down into more details on the new capabilities.

Let’s take a look at the key updates.

INCREASED CAPACITY

We are introducing new industry-leading 22 TB disks to deliver increased backup capacity over the previous generation. These disks along with new space optimizations provide 32 percent more capacity, with the base rack now offering 274 TB of backup capacity. A fully populated rack with 17 storage servers offers 1.57 petabytes of backup capacity and with a 10% daily change rate, offers up to 15 PB of virtual full capacity as only changed data is backed up to the appliance to achieve full restores to any point-in-time.

Scale Out — Figure 1. RA23 Scale-out Rack Configurations

INCREASED PERFORMANCE

RA23 supports new 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for faster backup, restore, and replication performance, meeting the needs of our customer base who are increasingly standardizing on 100GbE networks. For Exadata customers, a new option is available to configure the Exadata backup network directly to the Recovery Appliance through the use of separate 100GbE ToR switches installed in the rack. This effectively creates a fast, dedicated backup network to the appliance, relieving corporate networks from servicing database backup and recovery network traffic, which can be significant for large Oracle environments. It also marks another milestone in our direction towards integration and optimization of product capabilities within the Oracle Engineered System product family.

SPACE-EFFICIENT, ENCRYPTED BACKUPS

In addition to the hardware enhancements, the upcoming RA software release offers compression and encryption of database backups to the appliance, all while using the incremental forever backup strategy. The Space-efficient, Encrypted Backups feature is unparalleled in the industry as only Oracle is aware of internal database formats and composition of the data to minimize storage consumption of encrypted backups. In particular, Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) databases are decrypted, compressed, and re- encrypted in memory on the database server using database-managed keys when backups are created. Similarly, these keys are available to the database when recovery operations are initiated – for these operations, backup data is decrypted, decompressed, restored, recovered on the database server and the original TDE data is then made available for access.

Backup Encryption — Figure 2. Space-Efficient Encrypted Backup

This feature and integration with Oracle TDE is an industry game-changer for end-to-end data security – from production to backup – and is especially critical for today’s cyber and ransomware protection needs. No data is ever decrypted on the appliance while being created, in-transit, or stored. And only the authorized database administrator can restore, recover, and open the database for access via the keys. No other party can access and read the data.

With other backup solutions, customers must choose between Oracle database encryption for end-to-end security or backup solution compression for storage savings. They are simply not able to compress encrypted database backups. On the other hand, with the Recovery Appliance, there is no such compromise – both database encryption and backup compression can be achieved with storage savings of 2X or more compared to other backup solutions.

SUMMARY

Over the years, the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance has continually advanced in performance, resiliency, and scalability since its inception in 2014. See the chart below for a quick look of how the Recovery Appliance has evolved.

History — Figure 3. Recovery Appliance Technology Evolution

As a striking example of the product evolution, a Recovery Appliance X4 Full Rack (18 storage servers) back in 2014 featured 224 TB capacity while today’s RA23 Full Rack (17 storage servers) features 1.57 PB capacity – that’s over 7X increase in the same rack!

In conclusion, the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is purpose-built for Oracle Database Backup and Recovery to meet the data protection demands for enterprises. The appliance provides critical, end-to-end data security capabilities, and does so at the lowest possible storage cost using a highly-efficient incremental forever + compressed backup strategy.

And with RA23, the innovation continues – here is a brief recap:

RA23 Hardware Features

Increased capacity with 22 TB disks. Base Rack supports 274 TB and Full Rack supports 1.57PB.
Increased performance with 100 GbE Backup, Restore, Replication Connectivity
Dedicated Exadata backup/restore network with 100GbE ToR Switches Option

Upcoming RA Software Features