Ensuring the availability and integrity of your data is paramount. Traditional disaster recovery (DR) solutions often involve significant infrastructure and licensing costs, especially for licensed databases like Oracle. However, a cost-effective alternative exists using Tessell’s Data Access Policies (DAP). By leveraging DAP to create a cross-region Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) policy, you can achieve continuous data replication without needing a live DR database, saving on infrastructure and licensing costs.
Understanding the Concepts
Disaster Recovery (DR)
DR is a set of procedures for recovering and protecting a business's IT infrastructure in a disaster. It is a crucial component of business continuity planning, ensuring critical systems and data can be restored quickly to minimize downtime and data loss. The goal of DR is to resume normal operations as swiftly as possible after an unexpected event, such as a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or system failure.
Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR)
PITR is a data recovery technique that allows you to restore a database to a specific point in time. It is essential for recovering from data corruption or accidental data deletions. By maintaining a history of database states, PITR enables organizations to revert to a precise moment before the incident occurred, ensuring minimal data loss and continuity of operations.
Data Access Policies (DAP)
Policies that manage how data is accessed, replicated, and stored across different regions. DAP ensures data security, compliance, and efficient data management by defining rules for data handling. These policies help in automating data replication processes, maintaining data consistency, and optimizing storage costs across multiple regions.
The Traditional Approach
Typically, DR involves maintaining a live database in a different region, continuously replicating data from the production database. This ensures zero data loss and minimal recovery time. However, this approach incurs significant costs.
Infrastructure Costs
Maintaining a live database requires the DR region's elastic compute and storage resources. This means continuously running servers, storage devices, and network resources, leading to high operational expenses. The infrastructure must also be capable of handling the full load of production traffic at any time, further increasing costs.
Licensing Costs
Running a live database means additional license fees for licensed databases like Oracle. These fees, especially for enterprise-level databases, can be substantial and are incurred even if the DR database is not actively used. Licensing costs can significantly impact the overall budget, making traditional DR solutions expensive.
The Cost-Effective Solution with Tessell’s DAP
Setting Up Continuous Data Replication
Using Tessell’s DAP, you can configure a cross-region PITR policy. This policy continuously replicates data from your production database to object/blob storage in a different region.
Snapshots and Transaction Logs
Regular snapshots of the production database and continuous transaction logging are stored in object/blob storage. This ensures that all data changes are captured and replicated. This method provides a seamless way to keep your DR data up-to-date without needing a live database, which is crucial for minimizing storage costs while ensuring data integrity and availability.
Regular snapshots capture the database's state at specific intervals, while transaction logs record every change made to the database. You create a reliable and cost-effective backup mechanism by storing these snapshots and logs in object/blob storage. In the event of a failure, you can use the most recent snapshot and transaction logs to reconstruct the database to its last known good state, ensuring minimal data loss.
Eliminating the Need for a Live DR Database
With data continuously replicated to object/blob storage, there’s no need to maintain a live database in the DR region. This drastically reduces infrastructure and licensing costs. By not having a live database, you avoid the high expenses of maintaining elastic compute resources and storage in the DR region. Moreover, for licensed databases like Oracle, you also save on hefty licensing fees, making this approach financially sustainable for organizations of all sizes.
Eliminating the need for a live DR database reduces traditional DR setups' operational complexity and cost. You no longer need to worry about the continuous synchronization of a live database, hardware maintenance, or software updates in the DR region. Instead, you can focus on maintaining a robust data replication strategy using object/blob storage, which is significantly more cost-effective and easier to manage.
On-Demand Cloning for Disaster Recovery
In the event of a production database failure, you can create a clone of the database on-demand using the replicated data.
Clone Creation
Using the snapshots and transaction logs stored in object/blob storage, create a clone of the production database. This process ensures that your data remains consistent and up-to-date with the latest transactions, providing a reliable backup ready to be activated.
Activation
Bring the cloned database online to serve as the DR database. This step is critical for business continuity. It allows you to swiftly switch operations to the DR database, minimize downtime, and ensure your services remain available to users.
Creating an on-demand clone means you only incur compute and storage costs when activating the DR database. This approach offers a significant cost advantage over maintaining a live DR database, as you only pay for the resources when used. The clone creation process leverages the latest snapshots and transaction logs to ensure the DR database is as current as possible, minimizing data loss and ensuring a smooth transition during a disaster.
Benefits
Cost Savings
Implementing this DR strategy results in significant cost savings.
Infrastructure Costs
Significant reduction as there’s no need for elastic compute and storage in the DR region. Without running a live database, you avoid the continuous costs associated with compute and storage resources, which can add up substantially over time.
Licensing Costs
For licensed databases, savings on license fees as you’re not running a live database. This is particularly beneficial for organizations using databases like Oracle, where licensing fees can be prohibitively expensive.
By leveraging object/blob storage for data replication, you minimize the infrastructure costs of maintaining a DR solution. Object/blob storage is typically much cheaper than elastic compute and storage resources, making it an ideal choice for cost-conscious organizations. Additionally, avoiding continuous licensing fees for a live DR database can result in substantial savings, freeing up the budget for other critical IT initiatives.
Zero Data Loss (RPO=0)
Continuous data replication ensures that no data is lost. By storing regular snapshots and transaction logs, you maintain a precise and current record of your database state. This approach guarantees that you can recover all data up to the last transaction during a disaster, ensuring zero data loss and maintaining data integrity.
Using snapshots and transaction logs provides a robust mechanism for capturing all changes made to the database. This ensures that, regardless of when a failure occurs, you have a complete and accurate record of all data up to that point. This zero data loss capability (RPO=0) is crucial for maintaining data integrity and ensuring your business operations can continue without interruption during a disaster.
Recovery Time (RTO)
Creating an on-demand clone takes time, so the recovery time won’t be zero. However, the cost savings and zero data loss often outweigh this consideration. While the cloning process may introduce a slight delay, the ability to avoid substantial infrastructure and licensing costs makes this trade-off acceptable for many organizations. Moreover, this approach ensures that your data is safe and can be recovered with minimal disruption.
While the recovery time objective (RTO) is not zero, the ability to quickly create and activate a DR database on demand ensures that your business can resume operations with minimal downtime. While not instantaneous, the cloning process is efficient and effective, providing a reliable way to restore your database in case of failure. The cost savings and zero data loss capabilities make this approach attractive for organizations looking to balance cost and recovery efficiency.
Poor Man’s DR
Implementing a cost-effective disaster recovery strategy using Tessell’s Data Access Policies (DAP) and a cross-region PITR policy is wise for businesses looking to reduce costs without compromising data integrity. Eliminating the need for a live DR database can achieve significant savings on infrastructure and licensing costs, making this approach an attractive alternative to traditional DR solutions. In the event of a failure, the on-demand cloning process ensures that your data is safe and recoverable with zero data loss, providing a robust and economical DR solution.
This strategy offers a scalable and flexible approach to disaster recovery, allowing organizations to tailor their DR plans to their needs and budget constraints. By leveraging the power of Tessell’s DAP and cross-region PITR policies, you can ensure that your data remains secure, accessible, and recoverable, providing peace of mind and business continuity in unexpected events.
