NetApp delivers disaster recovery capabilities for Oracle

Pad, with 17 It experience, has been a solution architect for Oracle for more than 10 years, primarily responsible for Oracle databases, Oracle Applications, Oracle Grid control, and Oracle collaboration The development work of the suite. Since joining NetApp's Oracle Alliance engineering team, he has worked closely with Oracle peers to develop industry-leading Oracle Fusion middleware disaster Recovery solutions and ILM (Information lifecycle Management) tools.

Application availability is critical to maintaining the competitiveness of the enterprise. However, disaster recovery solutions are expensive, forcing many companies to protect only the most critical applications.

Emerging SOA (service-oriented architecture) trends and other advances in application deployment methods make application disaster recovery more challenging. The middleware used in application deployment may contain metadata and run-time state, and the metadata and run-time state must be replicated correctly to enable rapid recovery of the application.

Oracle®fusion Middleware is a portfolio of Oracle middleware solutions that not only contains many middleware features, but also a broad set of software to assist in the development, deployment, and management of SOA and other applications. Recently, NetApp and Oracle have joined hands with Oracle Fusion middleware applications to launch a comprehensive disaster recovery solution to ensure the replication of critical middleware data.

This article outlines the solution. For more information about the solution, including detailed deployment instructions and best practices, see the introduction in the recent joint technical report. This solution is also the topic of upcoming presentations in Oracle OpenWorld 2008.

Overview of disaster recovery with NetApp for Oracle Fusion Middleware

Our Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery solution consists of the following two main elements:

Netapp®snapmirror® technology that protects Oracle Fusion middleware binaries and configuration and metadata files by replicating the middle tier application layer.

Oracle data Guard, which protects data stored in an Oracle database.

Figure 1) combines NetApp snapmirror and Oracle Data Guard to protect Oracle Fusion middleware applications.

NETAPP Snapmirror enables you to replicate data in a global network in a simple, reliable, and cost-effective way. Efficient storage devices and network bandwidth utilization can help simplify configuration and management while reducing costs. You can also choose to use NETAPP flexclone® technology to make space-saving snapmirror data volume replicas at primary or secondary sites for testing, deployment, and quality assurance work.

Using NETAPP Snapmirror simplifies the replication process for Oracle Fusion middleware; storage-layer mirroring provides a quick, efficient and independent replica of the middleware server, making the time saved by the server cycle available for application work.

Oracle Data Guard is an extended feature of Oracle Database 10g and 11g and will be available in the Enterprise Edition of these two products. It includes a simple mechanism to keep one or more alternate copies of a database up to date with Oracle's redo logs, as well as to provide multiple functions such as management, monitoring, and automation.

This set of solutions, combined with NETAPP snapmirror and Oracle data Guard, not only protects critical data in the database, but also makes important Oracle Fusion middleware configuration and metadata information not compromised. The application can be restarted quickly and accurately at the standby site when a failover is required. Complete configuration details will be provided in the recent technical reports.