Ditch Oracle RAC and lower your costs while keeping your databases highly available in the cloud

Are you using Oracle to support your business-critical applications?  Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) help provide high availability for Oracle databases. However, RAC has some disadvantages that may be hindering your ability to modernize your IT services.  Are you looking at moving to the cloud?  The options for running RAC in the public are very limited.  Have you thought about security and ransomware resiliency?  What about recovery from failures with zero data loss (zero RPO)?  Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency can help with all of this – as a single proven solution for managing Oracle databases in both on-premises environments and in the public cloud.

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency Enterprise helps optimize your Oracle databases and enables you to run Oracle with flexibility and confidence.  Some of the key benefits Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency provides for Oracle:  

• Cloud – run single-instance Oracle databases in any public cloud with a highly available configuration that delivers close to the same availability as RAC at a reduced cost
• Performance – Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency can accelerate database performance in on-prem and public cloud environments without incurring costs for higher performance storage 
• Resiliency – Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s integrated automation and replication functionality enables zero data loss (zero RPO) DR configurations with very low recovery times (near-zero RTO)

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency also offers several integrated security features that work as part of a multi-layered resiliency strategy to help ensure that your Oracle databases are protected from malware and are easily recoverable:

• SecureFS – provides data immutability with automatically created WORM checkpoints to reduce the impact of ransomware attacks and data corruption
• Encryption – volume encryption for Linux and Windows systems ensures that your data is secure and protected from unauthorized access
• Data isolation – create secure copies of your database in an isolated network where it’s safe from potential malware threats and can be quickly recovered 

With all these features available as a single solution, Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency is a proven enterprise platform for Oracle. Let’s take a look at how it all works.

Oracle in the Public Cloud

Are you considering moving your Oracle databases to the public cloud?  If you’re currently using RAC in your on-prem environment, you may need to look at other ways to provide high availability and resiliency for Oracle in public cloud services.  

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s Cluster File System (CFS) with Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) is the ideal way to create a highly available Oracle single-instance solution in the cloud.  Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s CFS with FSS is an enterprise shared storage solution that enables you to mount a file system on multiple cloud VM’s at the same time – which dramatically reduces failover times.  FSS supports disk devices in the public cloud, which enables you to build a shared storage solution for Oracle in Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.  Figure 1 is an example of an Oracle single-instance database running in a highly available single-instance configuration in Microsoft Azure.

Figure 1 Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s fast failover solution for Oracle single-instance databases in the cloud

In this configuration, Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency provides very fast failover for your Oracle database by eliminating the slow storage operations (ex: unmount, remount) needed to restart the database on the passive node in the event of a system failure.  To ensure the lowest RTO, Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s Intelligent Monitoring Framework (IMF) can detect failures via kernel level modules that deliver near instantaneous failure detection.  This means that Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency can act immediately to take corrective actions in the event of a system fault.

The fast failover of a single instance Oracle Database can be done in a matter of seconds depending on various parameters, including the size of the database and other system configuration details.

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency also provides a replication solution – Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) – that enables multi-platform DR for your Oracle databases.  DR can be configured between datacenters and public clouds – with zero data loss (zero RPO).  An example configuration is shown in Figure 2.  VVR is also a robust mechanism for moving data into public cloud environments – helping you migrate to the cloud efficiently.  

Figure 2 Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency DR architecture in the cloud with a zero RPO over any distance

Securing Oracle Workloads

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s SecureFS technology delivers an additional layer of security for your Oracle databases to protect you against ransomware and data corruption.  With SecureFS, space-optimized immutable checkpoints are created automatically.  Immutable checkpoints are I/O and storage efficient and enable you to restore Oracle databases very quickly with rollbacks, which significantly reduces restore times compared to a traditional database recovery from a backup image. 

Figure 3 Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s SecureFS immutable checkpoints protect your databases from ransomware attacks

Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency offers volume encryption for Linux and Windows systems to keep your data secure and protected against unauthorized access, while limiting risks/exposure from data exfiltration. 

In addition to SecureFS and encryption, Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency enables isolation for production data by mirroring data volumes and isolating them from new I/O – which helps keep data volumes inaccessible by malware. For an additional layer of security, you can optionally use an anti-malware engine to scan these volumes to ensure they’re free of ransomware. Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency’s FastResync option allows you to quickly reassociate isolated volumes with the original volume in an optimized manner where only changed data is synchronized. This gives you a fast and reliable way to protect your Oracle databases from ransomware attacks with a very low RPO and RTO. 

Figure 4 Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency enables primary data isolation for added security and protection against ransomware

Summary

With cloud services becoming mainstream and new security concerns arising every day, it’s important to have a multi-faceted solution that can make your Oracle databases highly available, secure, and resilient. Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency is a single solution that provides enterprise security, high availably and advanced resiliency for business-critical Oracle databases – with the flexibility to run in the public cloud.  With Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency, you have the foundation you need to run Oracle databases in the cloud with confidence.

For more information on how Veritas Alta Enterprise Resiliency works with Oracle databases, check out this overview.

Check out this short demo of an Oracle single-instance database running in the cloud in a highly available configuration.