OCI DR in the Cloud

Business Continuance via Disaster Recovery is an essential element of IT and takes on many forms. The high end consists of high availability solutions that provide real-time replication of systems. While these systems provide seamless continuity during outages they are large, complex, and expensive, justifiable to support only the most critical business applications. At the other end of the continuum, however, Disaster Recovery is little more than tape backup or backup to NAS which have complicated and lengthy restore procedures which take hours or days.
A major improvement can be made in disaster recovery with a solution that provides business continuity in a model that simply extends the existing IT architecture into the Cloud.

Rackware RMM Migration/DR platform is a non-intrusive Agentless Technology with pre- and post- Migration Configuration Capabilities that is easy to set up and configure for complicated enterprise environments/applications. Rackware RMM supports both Linux and Windows-based workloads for migration to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

RackWare RMM platform provides a flexible and all-encompassing solution for Migration and disaster recovery. RackWare helps Enterprises and large Organizations take advantage of the agility promised by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Rackware’s platform eliminates the complexity of protecting, moving, and managing large-scale applications, including critical business applications and their workloads into the Oracle Cloud. It is now possible for enterprise customers to forgo the upfront purchase of duplicate recovery hardware, the cost of set up, configuring, and maintaining that hardware by leveraging Oracle cloud infrastructure.

Rackware RMM provides the following value proposition for enterprises in the Oracle Cloud:

  • Non-disruptive / Live Captures -No agents installed, safe and secure replication of your production environments
  • Network and Application Discovery – Automatically discover network configurations and applications allowing you to reconfigure them in the OCI environment during migration
  • Universal DR Protection – RackWare support spans all physical and virtual confluences, even for complex environments with Large SQL Clusters, and Network Attached Storage
  • Seamless Failback –  To physical and virtual environments, for simple disaster recovery drills
  • Cost Reduction – Orchestration engine for multiple polices of RPOs and RTOs based on tolerance to reduce costs with less expensive compute, network, and storage utilization.

Storage Methods

There are 2 storage methods available for Disaster Recovery.

Store and Forward

Store and Forward will create an image of your source workload in storage on the RMM’s database. When using this method, the RMM will need a datastore capable of containing the amount of used data from each source hosts minus typical compression savings.

Store and Forward is required if using the auto-provision feature whereby the RMM will only provision the compute resources during a DR event or test/drill event or to offer the multi-stage protection of having data protected by a stored image and then synced from stored image to target compute resources.

Passthrough

RMM does not store a copy of the used data from source hosts. The RMM acts as a passthrough proxy to sync the source workload data through itself and onto the target DR instances.

How it works

RMM provides a DR solution that builds on its image mobility and elasticity features to bring economic DR to enterprises. The building blocks of RackWare’s DR solution include onboarding, cloud bursting and the policy framework to automate necessary functions. Captured images from production (origin) instances are cloned and pushed out to a local or remote DR site. Changes in production images are periodically synchronized with the remote images, keeping the original host Image and the DR image in sync. In the event of an outage at the origin site, the up to date image at the DR site can assume operations through RackWare’s fail-over mechanism.

After the production instance is repaired and operational, it’s easy to restore the origin site to any up any changes made to the CloudImage in the cloud. When the origin site is restored to its operational state, the administrator can utilize the capture from cloud feature to refresh the original Image and synchronize any changes that occurred during the outage.

Overhead on the origin Host is extremely small involving only resources to take a delta snapshot. Thus the data overhead of the WAN link incurs only the delta of information, keeping bandwidth needs and sync time to a minimum. It’s important that Image updates include user data, Operating System updates, and application installations and configuration changes so that the recovery image behaves exactly like the production image should a failover occur. The cloud DR feature supports all of these. While OS updates are more infrequent it is still important to ensure that kernel patches are kept in sync with the DR Image. When updating the OS, an image refresh operation is done from the RMM first before the sync to the CloudImage. Should the production system be compromised or inoperable, the CloudImage is automatically launched and is running with the latest synchronized changes.

Oracle & Rackware partnership provides a seamless experience to Migrate to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and secure customer workloads with dynamic provisioning and disaster recovery.

About TekStream
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