Just how important is disaster recovery for your business?  Any business would need to protect its assets, and your most important asset is the data you collect about your customers, your competitors and your operations.  Any failure in your system, component or site can be very expensive.  Data corruptions, application downtime and human error could mean lose of sales. It can also result to more business expenses and other non-monetary implications such as negative publicity, bad customer experience and non-compliance with industry and governmental rules and regulations.

The thing is, businesses should be protecting their data from data loss and ensuring that their applications have constant access to this data at all times.  This is taken care of with a good disaster recovery solution.  However, most businesses are putting disaster recovery solution in the backseat.  Maybe this is because they think that a crippling disaster would never happen to them, or for those that who do consider such an event, they think that the disaster recovery systems are too much of a hassle and too expensive for something that they would use very rarely.

Oracle Data Guard and Active Data Guard to the rescue

Thanks to Oracle Data Guard and Active Data Guard, you can expect all of that to change.  You get high level data protection for your Oracle Database and ensure the highest levels of availability for your applications.  At the same time, it will bring down the cost of disaster recovery by making use of unused systems to delegate workloads when it is on standby.  And because Data Guard is closely integrated with Oracle Database, you also get automatic failover in the event of unplanned downtimes and rolling upgrades for your database.

Oracle Data Guard gives you the means to manage, monitor and automate the process of creating and then subsequently maintaining standby databases.  It is focused to protect your data from disasters, failures, corruptions and even human error.  As such, it helps you get your disaster recovery system off the ground while also giving you maximum availability for your most important business applications.

Meanwhile, Oracle Active Data Guard helps protect data in real time.  You can use it to delegate your read-only queries to a standby database, which frees up capacity while also giving you faster response times.  Oracle Active Data Guard also validates your entire standby database to ensure that all of these are production-ready.

Other functionalities of Oracle Active Data Guard include:

• Application block repair, which helps you repair physical corruptions in your primary and secondary databases.
• Far sync, which helps you avoid any data loss while also giving you the leeway to compress your data in a network other than your primary network.
• RMAN Block Change Tracking, which gives you 20 times faster incremental backups than what you are used to.
• Active Data Guard Rolling Upgrade to help you cut down your planned downtimes and minimize the many risks during upgrades.
• Application continuity helps you hide application outages from users.

Both Active Data Guard and Oracle Data Guard are now widely used for disaster recovery and backup, and it is easy to see why.  It makes disaster recovery simple, efficient and cost-effective.  Four Cornerstone can help you do just that. Contact us now!

Photo by Oracle.