The Legacy Gap: Falling Short in Addressing Oracle Environment Needs
Application owners and database administrators face the arduous challenge of managing and protecting database environments that are idiosyncratic and growing in size. Growing data volumes are a result of larger datasets, as well as stricter compliance and regulatory mandates, requiring organizations to retain data for longer periods. Legacy products were not designed for the era of modern application development which mandates greater data mobility, visibility, and control.
Challenges with legacy backup approaches include:
- Difficulty in scaling complex, multiple point solutions to accommodate growing datasets.
- Data silos across the organization, low data visibility, and a lack of cross-organizational data management capabilities.
- Disruptive upgrade processes that require extensive planning and business downtime.
- Inflexible deployments, often requiring a combination of scripts and complex, manual workflows.
- An inability to leverage the public cloud for long-term retention.
- A lack of ability to reuse back up data for the plurality of use cases in non-production.
Underpinning many of these challenges is a fundamental architectural gap in legacy solutions. The implications are significant: curtailed database performance, larger backup windows, and an inability to rapidly scale and recover.
It’s simple: a modern approach to Oracle data management needs to take into account the scale and performance requirements of today’s datasets and the strategic initiatives of enterprises today. Make no mistake, however, addressing fundamental gaps of legacy solutions alone is not enough.
Going Beyond Addressing Challenges: Cohesity Ushers in a New Era in Data Management
Modern solutions go beyond a stopgap for legacy inefficiencies or applying a glossy veneer. Marginal improvements, on the order of basis points, are inconsequential. Modern solutions probe into the fundamental pain points of their users.
Cohesity provides a modern approach to data management by providing a simple, quick, and cost-effective backup, recovery, and data management solution for Oracle databases at scale. In doing so, Cohesity addresses several fundamental challenges with legacy backup products and goes beyond data protection. Cohesity provides:
- Flexible backups and recovery — for a more resilient organization
- Ability to securely extend existing backups with zero-cost clones for development and testing use cases — for a more innovative organization
Enabling a Resilient Organization: Flexible Backup and Recovery
Dispelling the stopgap narrative, Cohesity understands that mandating a single solution is not a viable alternative. Flexibility is a necessity. With an API-driven approach, Cohesity is able to provide a seamless experience regardless of a user’s choice; users can back up and recover their Oracle environments with two methods:
- Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) native integration
- Writing to Cohesity DataPlatform as an NFS Target
Oracle RMAN Native Integration
The cardinal words regarding the native integration with RMAN are simplicity and flexibility.
Cohesity natively integrates with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to provide application-consistent backup and recovery for both Oracle single instance or Real Application Clusters (RAC). The values of a rich, native integration with Oracle Recovery Manager cannot be overstated—the benefits run the gamut. The overarching benefit is an integrated and centralized approach in the backup and recovery of Oracle environments. It simplifies Oracle backups without the need to write, maintain, and update RMAN scripts and provides a single location to schedule backups for multiple Oracle databases.
Cohesity provides options—for backups and recovery. This extent of flexibility is a key component of a modern data management solution. It’s important to be able to recover rapidly. It’s equally important to recover on your terms, accommodating your unique infrastructure needs.
By understanding underlying customer pain points and leveraging a true, distributed scale-out system, Cohesity yields the following benefits:
- Rapid RPOs and RTOs to meet business SLAs.
- Incremental forever, application-consistent backups.
- A range of recovery options including overwrite, alternate site recovery, point-in-time, and granular recovery.
- Configurable multi-node and multi-channel support for RAC, allowing the user to determine the level of performance for the task at hand.
Leveraging Cohesity DataPlatform as an NFS Target
Your team knows your infrastructure better than anyone. As a result, you may have a collection of unique, and nuanced, configurations uniquely suited to your environment. A modern solution needs to be able to leverage more than modern technology; it must also be able to leverage your team’s talent.
Cohesity is able to be presented as an NFS target, enabling direct mount from Oracle environments. RMAN is able to automatically leverage Cohesity’s QoS policies for optimal data tiering as well as deduplication and replication—all without the need for a single media server. The Cohesity Scheduler provides a single pane of glass to manage your backups and reports, including blackout windows and maintenance windows.
With the ability to write to Cohesity as a target, you can take advantage of Cohesity’s benefits and still integrate with your current tools and workflows:
- Leverage your existing RMAN scripts suited to your environment.
- Gain space efficiency with Cohesity’s global variable-length (sliding-window) deduplication and compression.
- Natively integrate with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure for seamless long-term retention and tiering.
Enabling Innovation: Rapid Access to High-Quality Data
Modern data management goes beyond checking boxes. Today, it’s not enough to merely back up and recover data if your company wants to maintain a competitive edge. Your data management solution should not be an insurance policy. Cohesity not only simplifies the protection and management of data, but it also allows your data to drive value in your application development process.
Make data an asset and leverage it to accelerate application development and testing, on-premises, and in the cloud. Cohesity enables developers with instant, zero-cost clones without impacting your production environment or capacity footprint. Instead of copying, lifting, and shifting the data to another infrastructure silo, Cohesity makes backup data productive by provisioning zero-cost clones for development and testing use cases.
Use your Oracle backup data to accelerate application development and testing. This is a fundamental shift in how infrastructure should be viewed. It’s not an insurance policy; infrastructure—modern infrastructure—can have a ripple effect on productivity and innovation. For application development, by leveraging Oracle backups, you can:
- Accelerate application development and testing, on-premises or in the cloud with instant, zero-cost clones.
- Enable developers and test teams with high-quality data, without impacting production.
- Always have the latest data available with data refresh—on demand.
Protecting Oracle environments does not need to be a challenge. Cohesity’s integration with Oracle RMAN, as well as native integrations with Oracle databases and environments, allows seamless protection. Cohesity addresses the core challenges faced by Oracle database administrators and stakeholders, providing a scale-out, distributed platform that is cognizant of the technical nuances of the Oracle ecosystem while supporting some of the top strategic goals of organizations: data resiliency, security, scalability, and catalyzing innovation.
Learn more: Modern Data Management for Oracle.
