Hybrid DR: a cost-effective strategy for on-prem Oracle

If your applications run on-prem, your DR and non-production environments are probably among themost expensive things you own that do the least. A DR site sits idle almost all of the time while still consuming hardware, power and Oracle database and middleware licences.

It’s insurance you pay for every day and hope never to use.Development and test environments add more cost again. Some organisationssimply can’t justify a DR environment at all, and hope they never have acomplete failure.A hybrid approachchanges that equation.

Disaster recovery in the cloud

With Oracle AI Database on OCI under the License Included model, you can run your DR database in the cloud and pay for what it actually uses. A Data Guard standby only needs enough compute to apply redo during normal operations. In a disaster you scale it up to take the full production workload. There are a few things to get right.

The cloud edition must include every option and pack your production database uses, or the standby won’t be able to take over. The time to scale up is part of your recovery time, so test it. Redo is usually shipped asynchronously over the WAN, so agree an acceptable data loss window with the business up front. Application tiers can be pre-built in the cloud and brought online quickly with automation, but plan for DNS, connection and network changes too, because they are often the slowest part of a failover.

Reduce the cost of disaster recovery, backups and non-production environments by combining your on-prem Oracle infrastructure with the flexibility of Oracle Cloud.

Non-production in the cloud

Development and test environments are a natural fit for the cloud under the same License Included model. Unlike on-prem hardware, cloud databases can be stopped outside working hours so you pay mainly for storage when nobody is using them.

Autonomous Database can simplify management for custom applications, while packaged applications are best kept on the same version and configuration as production. If you refresh non-production from production data, mask sensitive information before it leaves your environment.

Backups in the cloud

The simplest starting point is offsite backup. RMAN can write backups to OCI Object Storage, encrypted, alongside your existing local backups. You keep fast local restores for everyday recovery and gain a secure offsite copy for disasters and long-term retention.

Object Storage retention rules can make those backups immutable, which adds protection against ransomware. For more demanding requirements, Oracle’s Autonomous Recovery Service adds incremental forever backups and near-zero data loss protection, and now supports on-prem databases.

Where to start

You don’t have to move everything at once. Many organisations start with offsite backups, move non-production next, and then build a cloud DR site once the network and processes are proven.