Availability of your database environment and continuous database protection is business-critical. Without continuous database protection, you can’t ensure business continuity. But it’s only a matter of time before you experience a failure. When (not if) that happens, will you be ready?
When it comes to disaster recovery, many businesses rely on conventional backup/restore procedures to protect their database from risks like operational failures, cyber-attack, disaster impacts, and data corruption. But restoring from traditional backups can be slow, taking hours or even days. Restoring from backups is also notoriously failure-prone because testing and validation are usually infrequent. Plus, depending on how frequently backups occur, you could lose hours’ worth of the most recent changes to your data.
If your organization requires rapid, resilient disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities and/or cannot tolerate data loss, you may want to consider a standby database configuration. A standby database is a copy of the primary database, usually at a remote location. It updates continuously to minimize data loss and can quickly “failover” to support ongoing operations if the primary database goes down or is corrupted.
Why use a standby database for disaster recovery and continuous database protection?
A standby server has several important advantages over traditional backup/restore tools for disaster recovery and data loss prevention:
- It is always operational and available in seconds, not hours or days, so you can recover more quickly.
- It minimizes potential data loss by updating continuously with minimal time lag.
- Its operational readiness is constantly verified, which guarantees database integrity after failover.
- It enables you to test your disaster recovery plan much more easily, with minimal risk or impact to your primary database and the applications that rely on it.
- It can be offsite, geographically distant, and running on separate infrastructure from your primary database, which reduces disaster risk in the event of operational failure at your production site.
- You can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your database is always backed up and can be restored or recovered at any time with no surprises.
In short, a standby database can be an ideal solution for organizations that want to ensure continuous database protection to minimize downtime, data loss, and business risk. The following figure illustrates a standby database configuration.
Meet Dbvisit, Buda Consulting’s standby database partner
Buda Consulting has considerable experience helping organizations implement backup/restore, high availability and disaster recovery solutions for their databases on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and open-source platforms. We have found our longtime partner Dbvisit to be a world-class standby database solution provider whose solutions are easy to use, cost-effective and backed by great customer service. Our customers of all sizes love Dbvisit, which is why we’re sharing this blog post.
We’re especially excited to share with our client base that Dbvisit now offers the industry’s first multiplatform option. Called StandbyMP, it enables you to manage standby databases for Oracle and SQL Server through a single pane of glass. Imagine confronting an outage and being able to failover all your databases automatically or with a single click! PostgreSQL support is also coming soon in 2022.
Another big advantage of Dbvisit solutions is you can deploy them on-premises, in a public cloud or on hybrid cloud. Supported public clouds include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
Gold Standard Disaster Recovery and Continuous Database Protection
The folks at Dbvisit are disaster recovery specialists, with thousands of customers in 120 countries and offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. While they serve some of the world’s leading enterprises, including Verizon, Barclays, 7-Eleven, the US Navy, Volkswagen, PWC and CBS, Dbvisit’ exceptional support and industry-leading total cost of ownership (TCO) make them a great choice for small to midsized businesses (SMBs) as well.
According to Neil Barton CTO of Dbvisit, “Dbvisit Standby guarantees database continuity through a verified standby database that is always available and ready to take over at the moment you need it.” Even if your most trusted DBA is on vacation when an emergency occurs at 3AM, your database(s) will be protected from contingencies ranging from human error to hardware failure to hurricanes to hackers.
Dbvisit Standby solutions for Oracle and/or SQL Server promise minimal data loss (a maximum of approximately 10 minutes) and fast database recovery/failover (within a few minutes). Continuous exercising and testing maintains and validates the integrity of your standby database 24×7. This is what Dbvisit calls “Gold Standard Disaster Recovery.” It offers the following value propositions:
- Database integrity with a verified standby database that is identical to the primary database and fully operational to ensure successful failover
- Resilience to meet your recovery requirements across all outage and disaster scenarios
- Automated and intuitive to eliminate manual processes, opportunities for error and dependence on highly skilled staff
- Decision simplification to “de-stress DR”
- Near-zero data loss
- Cost-efficiency and low risk
Dbvisit lives up to its motto: “We believe nothing should stand in the way of your business moving forward.”
Dbvisit StandbyMP: Enterprise-class DR for multiple database platforms
Using different disaster recovery tools and processes across multiple database types has always been complex. Dbvisit’s new StandbyMP offering promises to reduce this complexity and for the first time allow customers to manage DR processes for SQL Server and Oracle SE databases through a single console. We are very excited about the multi-platform concept and are looking forward to the addition of PostgreSQL and other popular databases soon.
Prioritizing risk reduction, disaster resiliency, recovery speed and ease of use, StandbyMP delivers rapid time-to-benefit, ease of administration and automated, on-demand failover. Dbvisit guarantees database continuity and radically reduces database risk with a consistent, “Gold Standard” approach to protecting both Oracle and SQL Server databases.
“Our software costs the equivalent of two minutes’ downtime,” said Tim Marshall, Product Marketing Manager, in a recent Dbvisit blog post. “Great doesn’t have to be expensive.”
Dbvisit highlights these key value propositions for its StandbyMP solution:
Simplify – Control your Oracle and SQL Server disaster recovery configurations from a single central console
Speed up – Multi/concurrent database actions accelerate recovery across both Oracle and SQL Server
Risk down – Automation removes manual processes, hard-to-maintain scripts, and opportunities for error
Level up – Simplify your disaster recovery plans and ensure best practices are implemented across all your databases
Next steps
An industry-leading standby database solution like Dbvisit StandbyMP can be the perfect way to continuously protect your critical data—but it’s not right for every database. To connect with an expert on whether a standby database makes sense for your business, contact Buda Consulting to schedule a 15-minute conversation.
For more information on Dbvisit solutions and services, check out Dbvisit.com.